An essay on the principal causes which unite in producing and diffusing disease : being the address in medicine, read before the Seventeenth Annual General Meeting of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, held at Worcester, August 1st and 2nd, 1849 / by Charles William Bell.

  • Bell, Charles William, 1811?-1862.
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An essay on the principal causes which unite in producing and diffusing disease : being the address in medicine, read before the Seventeenth Annual General Meeting of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, held at Worcester, August 1st and 2nd, 1849 / by Charles William Bell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    the protection of the public health ought to rest, and have given occasion for some discussion of the doctrines propounded by the General Board of Health; not certainly with any intention of needlessly finding fault, but from a conviction that they are in some respects founded upon error that must tend partially to defeat the objects which that Board has laboured, so assiduously to promote. The small degree of influence exerted by medical opinion on questions of this nature proves how much of the public confidence has been lost to the profession by a want of unanimity on the important subject of contagion that is highly derogatory to the dignity of medicine as a science. The Author would, therefore, gladly indulge the hope that some of the obscurity of the subject may have been removed by the arguments here offered for believing that contagion can arise from no cause that is not able to reproduce itself in the system by chemical decomposition of the materials of the body. 94, Mosley Street, Manchester, October 8, 1849.