Unusual offprint, rare, and not listed in Ferguson.

Unusual offprint, rare, and not listed in Ferguson.

This lecture by Edward C. Stirling, Surgeon to the Adelaide Hospital and lecturer at the University of Adelaide, "Is Surgery a Science?" is printed from the Intercolonial Medical Congress of Australasia Transactions, from their second session in Melbourne, January 1889.

Stirling was born in 1848 at Strathalbyn, South Australia. Educated at Cambridge, and sometime lecturer at St George's Hospital, London, he returned to South Australia in 1875. He had a long and varied career, which included a stint as the member for North Adelaide, a crossing of the continent from south to north with the Earl of Kintore in 1891, and work as the medical officer and anthropologist with the important William Horn expedition in 1894. A long note in the Australian Dictionary of Biography shows the breadth of his interests: he was actively associated with the Public Library, the Art Gallery, the Zoological Society, the Adelaide Hospital and the State Children's Council, dean of the Faculty of Medicine in 1908-19 and president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in South Australia. He participated in the long struggle to secure Flinders Chase on Kangaroo Island as a sanctuary. In 1917 Stirling was knighted; he died two years later.

Attractively, the work was considered of such interest that one "J. von Düring" has sent the pamphlet through the Australian posts to "E. Chisholm" M.D., of Victoria Street in Ashfield, New South Wales. Hence the old fold running lengthwise along the book, as well as the address details and various postmarks to the back wrapper: two are sadly illegible, but the third is still clear: "Southern Railway S.A. Au 22 89".

Although various copies of the Transactions proper are held, this offprint is not in Ferguson, and not known to have been acquired by any Australian institutions since. Interestingly, several other offprints from the same Melbourne congress of 1889, and also printed by Stillwell, are known: Jamieson, On want of proportion in the signs and symptoms of diseases of the heart and great vessels; Marano, On pneumatic therapeutics by means of the portable apparatus; Grant, A Case of Raynaud's Disease.