William Buchan

views updated

William Buchan

1729-1805

Scottish physician who wrote the most popular general medical guidebook of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Intended for a lay audience, Domestic Medicine, or the Family Physician was first published in Edinburgh in 1769. In the next 80 years this home remedy manual appeared in over 100 British and American editions with over a dozen subtitles. It is the second best selling medical book of all time after Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care.

More From encyclopedia.com