Dr. Garth the Kit-Kat poet 1661-1718

Baltimore: The Lord Baltimore Press, 1906. 4to, pp. 42; portrait and 4 plates; original printed wrappers neatly rebacked and with some restoration along the edges; very good. Reprinted from the Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, January, 1906. Garth was both a physician and a poet, and a fellow of the College of Physicians. On the last page of the Harveian oration at the College of Physicians, Garth "alludes to a scheme, which had been discussed in the college from 1687, for establishing a dispensary where poor people could obtain advice and prescriptions from the best physicians. In 1699 Garth published The Dispensary, a Poem, which is a record of the (truncated) first attempt to establish those out-patient rooms now universal in the large towns of England. The Dispensary ridicules the apothecaries and their allies among the fellows. The poem continued to be generally read for fifty years, and some of its phrases are still quoted. It describes a mock Homeric battle between the physicians and the apothecaries, Harvey being finally summoned from the Elysian fields to prescribe a reform" (DNB). (Inventory #: 47117)