Volume 1

The works of John Hunter / edited by James F. Palmer.

Date:
1835-37
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The works of John Hunter / edited by James F. Palmer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    ings, Hunter’s fame has hitherto rested; perhaps too exclu- sively so, since it has arisen from the circumstance that, with the exception of the treatise on syphilis, his other works have been less generally read than they deserve, in consequence of their having been published either in an ex- pensive form or in detached treatises, scattered through the volumes of the Philosophical Transactions, or of the Me- dical and Chirurgical Society. There are not, however, any of his writings which do not well deserve the attentive per- usal of professional men, not only for the information they furnish, but as models of bold and sagacious reasoning; and hence the present edition, which places within the reach of every professional man the whole of his works, heightened, too, in value by the commentaries of the able men to whose revision they have been severally entrusted, cannot fail to be viewed as a tribute justly due to the merits of Hunter, and as a highly important accession to our medical literature. The treatise on Inflammation and Gunshot Wounds must be considered as comprising the results of forty years’ as- siduous attention to the subject, since, from his Introduction, we learn, that the doctrines it unfolds first suggested them- selves to his mind at the time he was a student in the Lon- don hospitals, and were based on observations collected du- ring that period. These doctrines he continued during his whole professional career to submit to the test of his own increasing experience and the experience of others, to whom he taught them in his lectures, ever carefully and candidly correcting them where more accurate observations proved them to be faulty, and extending them where fresh information showed them to be deficient; and having thus brought them to as high a degree of perfection as his abili- ties and opportunities would permit, he at length submitted them to the test ot public opinion in the condensed and systematic form in which we now possess them.