New Rare Book Acquisition Helps Tell the History of Medical Science

Pepperdine Libraries is pleased to announce the acquisition of a salesman's copy of The Household Physician, A Twentieth Century Medica; A Practical Description in Plain Language of All the Diseases of Men, Women and Children (1931) by Herbert Buffum. This new Special Collections and Archives book gives students an additional opportunity to engage directly with a unique primary source that encompasses medicine, homeopathy, phrenology, and even veterinary science. Already helpful to readers examining the pluralistic nature of American healthcare in the early twentieth century, our edition of The Household Physician is even more valuable because it's a canvassing book. 

Designed for door-to-door salesmen, these canvassing books were meant to entice potential buyers, offering an intriguing glimpse that (hopefully) resulted in advance orders. Publications such as The Household Physician were available exclusively through subscription, as noted on our volume's title page (above). Traveling representatives collected purchase agreements, and full copies of the book were printed and dispatched only after the initial sales round concluded. Canvassing books survive in far smaller numbers than the works they helped promote because they were often discarded once selling periods ended. 

Because the complete edition of The Household Physician is so massive—expanding from a single 1,440-page tome in earlier printings to a two-volume set by 1931—the publisher's sample offers just a selection of its pages bound out of numerical order. To captivate customers, it features bold promotional headlines such as "A Mother’s Duty," "Cure Your Cold in 48 Hours," and "Over 375 Medical Prescriptions in Latin and English," as well as interactive plates with movable flaps. This design enabled a salesman to flip back and forth between promotional leaves and eye-catching illustrations according to the needs of each sales pitch. An example of the embossed cover, mounted within the back cover of the canvassing book, provides a final flourish to the sample (see above). 

Stepping inside the sample pages offers a fascinating window into early twentieth-century domestic healthcare. The book’s subtitle, A Twentieth Century Medica, is a direct nod to materia medica, or the knowledge of medicinal drugs obtained from plants or other natural sources. Within its first ten pages, our canvassing book features a section on plant medicine with guidance on foraging roots and herbs, an alphabetical glossary, and full-color botanical plates printed on smooth, glossy paper (above). 

Moving deeper into the text, modern readers will find much that feels surprisingly relatable; a chapter titled "Diseases Peculiar to Modern Times" laments how the "press, telegraph, telephone, and steam appliances" cause us to "rush through life," resulting in overtaxed nervous systems and sleep deprivation. Some everyday advice, such as startling a patient to cure their hiccups, remains unchanged. However, the book frequently swings into remedies that have decidedly not stood the test of time. The same section on hiccups also suggests administering "cocaine, one-eighth grain every 15 mins" as a "simple and often efficacious remedy."

Elsewhere, a chapter titled "The Woman Beautiful" suggests a rigid "Complexion Diet" that strictly forbids drinking water with meals. Just above that is advice to drink a glass of milk every hour (presumably when one is not eating) to "wash all impurities out of the system."

The book offers a built-in mechanism for keeping its contents current. Bound into the volume is a series of perforated coupons (see above). For ten cents in postage and handling, a subscriber could mail one in each year (up to four years after purchase). In return, the customer would receive a supplemental page outlining "the latest discoveries in medicine and medical practice" that could be added to their book. 

The Household Physician captures a fascinating transitional moment in American healthcare. Although the medical field was becoming increasingly institutionalized, access to trained physicians remained limited. Many families continued to lean on the self-reliant guidance of encyclopedic home references—the Great Depression's onset in 1929 only increased the desire to administer care at home. This canvassing book's hybrid nature also offers a unique opportunity to interact with both materiality and content, inviting readers to theorize on dual historical perspectives: the clinical aims of the medical professionals who authored its text and the commercial motives of the publishers who engineered its physical form for door-to-door sales. Ultimately, engaging with such a complex artifact will promote learning about how people nearly a century ago navigated the world of health.