Dissertation presented for the degree of Doctor of Medicine at Edinburgh University, in a sumptuous binding for presentation purposes, as was the convention of the time.

Dissertation presented for the degree of Doctor of Medicine at Edinburgh University, in a sumptuous binding for presentation purposes, as was the convention of the time.

Although the thesis itself may be conventional, it sits at an important moment in the history of renal medicine, just two years after publication of Richard Bright's monumental Reports of Medical Cases (1827), which effectively founded modern clinical nephrology and established the modern understanding of kidney disease. Its author is remembered in the naming of "Bright's disease". Buzzard would have had to study that work closely, and this thesis would be an early indicator of the spread of the new discipline.

Marston Buzzard graduated from Edinburgh with this thesis and subsequently practised medicine in Lutterworth in Leicestershire.

One unusual feature of the thesis is that it has three separate pages of dedications: to James Powell, vicar of Bitteswell; to the author's friend John Goodacre; and to William Seller M.D. Goodacre's name turns up alongside Buszard's in the historical record as together involved in an insolvency case following an investment gone sour.

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Dissertatio medica inauguralis de nephritide. Quam, annuente summo Numine, ex auctoritate reverendi admodum viri D. Georgii Baird, SS. T. P., Academiæ Edinburgenæ præfecti, necnon amplissimi senatus academici consensu, et nobilissimæ facultatis medicæ decreto, pro gradu Doctoris, summisque in medicina honoribus ac privilegiis rite et legitime consequendis, eruditorum examini subjicit Marston Buszard, Anglus, Coll. Reg. Chirurg. Lond. socius. Non quaerit æger medicum eloquentem, sed sanantem. — Seneca, Ep. 76. III. Id. Julii, horâ locoque solitis. Edinburgi: Excudebat Joannes Moir. MDCCCXXIX.

Inaugural medical dissertation on nephritis. Which, with the favour of Almighty God, by the authority of the Very Reverend George Baird, Doctor of Sacred Theology, Principal of the University of Edinburgh, and with the consent of the Most Honourable Academic Senate, and by decree of the Most Noble Faculty of Medicine, for the degree of Doctor of Medicine, and for the due and lawful attainment of the highest honours and privileges in medicine, is submitted to the examination of the learned by Marston Buszard, an Englishman, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of London. "The sick man seeks not an eloquent physician, but one who heals." — Seneca, Epistle 76. On the third day before the Ides of July (13 July), at the customary hour and place. Edinburgh: Printed by John Moir. 1829.