A Compendium of Practical and Experimental Farriery originally suggested by reason and confirmed by practice. Equally adapted for the convenience of the gentleman, the farmer, the groom, and the smith. : Interspersed with such remarks, and elucidated with such cases, as evidently tend to insure the prevention, as well as to ascertain the cure of disease

Description:

William Taplin (1740's -1807) was apprenticed in Middlesex to the apothecary George Harding from 1763 to 1770. 'Taplin considered himself a doctor or a surgeon apothecary, from 1770 to the mid 1780s he practiced surgery for 'families of the first respectability'. During this period of his life, he became very interested in racing and equine sport. At the beginning of the 1770s he became a member of elite hunting circles and met influential individuals who supported him throughout his career. By the end of the 1780s, Taplin had become the most popular equine health care author in England; he built a large London receptacle for horse care and created the largest network of equine medical sales for pills in the eighteenth century'. M. H. MacKay, 2009, The Rise of a Medical Specialty: The Medicalisation of Elite Equine Care c.1680 - c.1800.

Condition

Recent half cloth, paper label to spine, new endpapers. Text uncut. Lacks frontis and folding plate. Signature of the silversmith Samuel Augustine Courtauld, dated August 1817, with his bookplate, motto Tiens a la vérité. He emigrated to the United States where he died in 1821.