A quick thread on the importance of book editions!

My current research thread is looking at a syphilis-like disease called sibbens (aka sivvens) that was present in Scotland from around the 17th to 19th centuries. One of the people who wrote about it was this chap, Joseph Adams:

In 1795 he published his Observations on Morbid Poisons. This includes a small section on sibbens (6 pages), in which he talks about how mysterious a disease it is, and his frustration over the lack of information about it.

It was kind of interesting (mostly because he describes another surgeon as being useless at describing diseases and has a weird bee in his bonnet about Edinburgh), but I quickly moved on to read other books for more information.

But what do I find when I read other books? Surgeons talking about Joseph Adams and his trip to Scotland to specifically see and learn about sibbens!

So I do a little digging. I find a paper from 1959 that gives a little biographical information on Adams, but it doesn't mentions sibbens. It does however link me up to his obituary in the London Medical Repository, which includes this info:

I can put this together with the biographical information from the 1959 paper, which says he was in Madeira from 1796 for 8 years. But his Observations was published in 1795 - so well before the trip to Scotland which fell between 1804 and 1805, when he got a job in London.

So of course there's no mention of this trip in the book I read first! I do a bit more hunting on his publications, and I find a second edition of Observations on Morbid Poisons - this one published in 1807, just after his Scotland trip.

And this time, there's an entire chapter dedicated to sibbens! He answers all the questions he had in the first edition and details his trip to Scotland, including cases he saw and which medical friends he stayed with. It's a treasure trove of information!

So the moral of the story is: different book editions can sometimes be pretty much different books! If you're digging for scraps on something that's hard to find, be sure to check them out.

Credits and references....
Image of Joseph Adams from RCSEng, Emery, A. E. "Joseph Adams (1756-1818)." Journal of medical genetics 26.2 (1989): 116-118.
1795 Observations digitised from University of Leeds: https://archive.org/details/b2151060x/page/n15/mode/2up

First Adams quote from an article by Dr Hibbert in the 1826 Edinburgh Journal of Medical Science: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=jHUBAAAAYAAJ
Second from Skae 1844, digitised by RCSEng: https://archive.org/details/b22386609/page/12/mode/2up

Obituary of Adams here: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=-HZEAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA167
1807 edition of Observations here: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=n-9eAAAAcAAJ