John Williamson Palmer (1825-1906), a Maryland physician, came to California in 1849 and left the following year for Hawaii and the Far East. In 1853 he settled in New York and pursued a new career as a writer, a career interrupted by his service in the Confederate Army and resumed in peacetime. The new and the old (1859) is divided equally between ancedotes of his medical practice in San Francisco in 1849 with colorful (and probably fictionalized) tales of a few of his friends and patients (including Karl Joseph Krafft) and similar tales drawn from his stay in India.