[4] Later that year, Parliament stopped funding the Foundling Hospital, so Buchan took up a practice in Sheffield from 1761 until 1766, when he returned to Edinburgh.

In 1778, Buchan announced his candidacy for the position as chair of the Institute of Medicine upon the death of John Gregory; however, he lost the election.

Catherine the Great, Czar of Russia, was so impressed by the work that she sent Buchan a gold medal and personal letter.

Previous to Buchan's work, most medical texts either were theoretical and written for the more educated, or were short manuals not descriptive enough to help diagnose illnesses.

A combination of these two styles, Domestic Medicine was written in lay terms in order to reach a wider audience.

Only Swiss physician Samuel-Auguste Tissot’s Avis au peuple was of similar style, and Buchan acknowledged it influenced his writing.

[4] Buchan experienced wider exposure than Tissot because he addressed new health areas such as industrial diseases.

Buchan's emphasis on a strict regimen of hygiene and cleanliness extended into moral judgement, in that he argued that immoral people were more likely to develop illness.

Like many physicians at the time, Buchan was a proponent of bloodletting and purging as treatment for inflammatory conditions: these and other evacuation-based therapies were viewed as physical methods of correcting improper solid-fluid tension within the body.

Buchan also advocated careful tracking of non-naturals (air, meat and drink, sleeping and watching, exercise and quiet, evacuations and obstructions, and passions).