Invalids' Guide-Book (Buffalo, 1894), giving a brief description of the Invalids' Hotel and Surgical Institute and the World's Dispensary Buildings

Buffalo: World's Dispensary Printing Office and Bindery, 1894. First Edition. Wraps. 8vo, 7.5 x 5 inches, softcover, in tan pictorial wraps. Good with tanning, wear, loss at corners, some pages a little dog-eared and creased, light wear and loss along spine, water stain tide marks to edges of front cover, frontispiece and first few pages. 167 pp, well illustrated, map of Buffalo at rear. Lots of testimonials and medical descriptions. Dr. Ray Vaughn Pierce was a colorful and controversial figure — an Eclectic Medical College of Cincinnati graduate who moved to Buffalo, New York in 1867 and engaged in the manufacture and sale of patent medicines, establishing the Invalids' Hotel and Surgical Institute. His venture grew out of enormous demand for his remedies: Pierce first established Pierce's Palace Hotel in 1878 to accommodate the many patients who came flocking to seek his curative skills, but that building burned down in 1881 and was replaced with the Invalids' Hotel and Surgical Institute at 663 Main Street. By May 1882, Pierce had consolidated his operations into two newly erected buildings situated back to back — the Invalids' Hotel and Surgical Institute on Main Street and the World's Dispensary behind it on Washington Street. The facility was marketed not as a hospital but as a refined therapeutic retreat: the building featured a grand entrance with a lofty porch supported by heavy iron columns, and the hotel offered comfortable, high-end accommodations exclusively devoted to the treatment of chronic diseases. By the 1890s it had grown into a substantial medical enterprise: the Institute was organized with a full staff of eighteen physicians and surgeons housed in a massive five-story building, with doctors specializing in chronic maladies and reputedly possessing abundant skill, facilities, and apparatus for treating every form of chronic ailment, whether medical or surgical. For patients who could not travel to Buffalo, Pierce operated a Bureau of Medical Correspondence, where ten to twelve physicians with stenographers were constantly employed attending to vast correspondence from invalids across the United States and Canada, with every important case reviewed by a council of three to five specialists. The institution continued operating — eventually under Pierce's son Valentine Mott Pierce after R.V. Pierce's death in 1914 — until 1941. This book is rare in the trade but well represented in institutional holdings. Good. Item #h45586

Price: $100.00