Gunn’s Domestic Medicine : Or Poor Man’s Friend, in the Hours of Affliction, Pain and Sickness…

John C. Gunn. Gunn’s Domestic Medicine : Or Poor Man’s Friend, in the Hours of Affliction, Pain and Sickness/This Book Points out in Plain Language Free from Doctors Terms, the Diseases of Men, Women and Children, and the Latest and Most Approved Means Used in Their Cure, and Is Expressly Written for the Benefit of Families in the Western and Southern States. It Also Contains Descriptions and Medical Roots and Herbs of the Western and Southern Country, and How They Are to Be Used in the Cure of Diseases; Arranged on a New and Simple Plan, of Which the Practice of Medicine Is Reduced to Principles of Common Sense. … 8th ed. Pumpkintown, Tennessee: S.M. Johnston, 1839.

Dr. John Gunn was not the most famous physician of his time, but his book and its successors went through hundreds of editions and became synonymous with domestic medicine in the 19th century. Mark Twain referenced it in his Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and John Steinbeck in East of Eden (1952). First published in 1830 in Knoxville, TN, this book addressed human psychology, botanic medicine, childbirth, epidemic disease, and even surgical amputation of the arm. The book’s contents expanded with the editions, and eventually contained anatomic diagrams, details of human physiology, and botanical plates.

This particular edition was published in Pumpkintown, TN, a defunct town near what is today Athens, in McMinn County, TN.