Anomalies and curiosities of medicine : being an encyclopedic collection of rare and extraordinary cases, and of the most striking instances of abnormality in all branches of medicine and surgery, derived from an exhaustive research of medical literature from its origin to the present day / abstracted, classified, annotated, and indexed, by George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle ; with 295 illustrations in the text, and 12 half-tone and colored plates.

  • Gould, George M. (George Milbry), 1848-1922.
Date:
1898, ©1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Anomalies and curiosities of medicine : being an encyclopedic collection of rare and extraordinary cases, and of the most striking instances of abnormality in all branches of medicine and surgery, derived from an exhaustive research of medical literature from its origin to the present day / abstracted, classified, annotated, and indexed, by George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle ; with 295 illustrations in the text, and 12 half-tone and colored plates. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    PREFATORY AND INTRODUCTORY. Since the time when man's mind first busied itself with subjects beyond his own self-preservation and the satisfaction of his bodily appetites, the anoma- lous and curious have been of exceptional and persistent fascination to him ; and especially is this true of the construction and functions of the human body. Possibly, indeed, it was the anomalous that was largely instrumental in arous- ing in the savage the attention, thought, and investigation that were finally to develop into the body of organized truth which we nowT call Science. As by the aid of collected experience and careful inference we to-day endeavor to pass our vision into the dim twilight whence has emerged our civilization, we find abundant hint and even evidence of this truth. To the highest type of philosophic minds it is the usual and the ordinary that demand investigation and explanation. But even to such, no less than to the most naive-minded, the strange and exceptional is of absorbing interest, and it is often through the extraordinary that the philosopher gets the most searching glimpses into the heart of the mystery of the ordinary. Truly it has been said, facts are stranger than fiction. In monstrosities and dermoid cysts, for example, we seem to catch forbidden sight of the secret work-room of Nature, and drag out into the light the evidences of her clumsiness, and proofs of her lapses of skill,—evidences and proofs, moreover, that tell us much of the methods and means used by the vital artisan of Life,—the loom, and even the silent weaver at work upon the mysterious garment of corporeality. La premiere chose qui s'offre a V Homme quand il se regarde, c'est son corps says Pascal, and looking at the matter more closely we find that it was the strange and mysterious things of his body that occupied man's earliest as well as much of his later attention. In the beginning, the organs and functions of generation, the mysteries of sex, not the routine of digestion or of locomotion, stimulated his curiosity, and in them he recognized, as it were, an unseen hand reaching down into the world of matter and the workings of bodily organiza- tion, and reining them to impersonal service and far-off ends. All ethnolo- gists and students of primitive religion well know the role that has been played in primitive society by the genetic instincts. Among the older naturalists, such as Pliny and Aristotle, and even in the older historians, whose scope included natural as well as civil and political history, the atypic and bizarre, and especially the aberrations of form or function of the generative organs,