Autobiography of Isaac Jones Wistar, 1827-1905: Half Century in War and Peace

Philadelphia: The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology, 1937. 528pp. Quarto [26 cm] Blue cloth with the title gilt stamped on the front board and backstrip. Very good/Near fine. Spine of jacket sunned. Former owner's blind stamp on the endsheets. "When one not inordinately addicted to discoursing of himself begins to contemplate a lapse from such negative virtue...." Isaac J. Wistar, who never confused modesty with self-repression, opens his autobiography in this forbidding, Victorian language. But he soon shifts to easily written, easily read narrative, reflecting Dana's 'Two Years Before the Mast' in its salt-tanged sea tales; twinkling here and there with a roguish humor not unworthy of Mark Twain, his contemporary; and pausing at the end of blood-and-thunder passages for Wistar, the adventurer, to allow the scientific-minded Wistar to relate some wound treatment or psychological observation. For Wistar lived through remarkable times and made the most of them. He traveled across the continent with the vanguard of the Forty-Niners in a journey almost epic in itself. he earned and lost small fortunes as a miner, trapper, muleteer, speculator, and lawyer before he was thirty, such was his versatility. He never hesitated to pistol, club, or butt anyone who crossed him; yet the Governor of California singled him out to suppress the Vigilante rioters of 1856. He stood armed to fight Abolitionists and believed ardently in states rights; yet his privately raised regiment is credited with saving the Union at Gettysburg and in the Seven Days Battles. All these seeming inconsistencies become an orderly part of the picture of the day in Isaac J. Wistar's forceful writing of his autobiography. It is the last word from a leader of a vanished American generation." - from the jacket. Graff 4724. Howes W598.