The human body : an account of its structure and activities and the conditions of its healthy working / by H. Newell Martin.

  • Martin, H. Newell (Henry Newell), 1848-1896.
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The human body : an account of its structure and activities and the conditions of its healthy working / by H. Newell Martin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    cussed: this was deliberately done as the result of an experi- ence in teaching Physiology which now extends over more than ten years. It would have been comparatively easy to slip over things still uncertain and subjects as yet unin- vestigated, and to represent our knowledge of the workings of the animal body as neatly rounded off at all its contours and complete in all its details—tutus, teres, et rotundus. But by so doing no adequate idea of the present state of physiological science would have been conveyed; in many directions it is much farther travelled and more completely known than in others; and, as ever, exactly the most inter- esting points are those which lie on the boundary between what Ave know and what we hope to know. In gross Anatomy there are now but few points calling for a suspension of judg- ment; with respect to Microscopic Anatomy there are more; but a treatise on Physiology which would pass by, unmen- tioned, all things not known but sought, would convey an utterly unfaithful and untrue idea. Physiology has not fin- ished its course. It is not cut and dried, and ready to be laid aside for reference like a specimen in an Herbarium, but is comparable rather to a living, growing plant, with some stout and useful branches well raised into the light, others but part grown, and many still represented by unfolded buds. To the teacher, moreover, no pupil is more discouraging than the one who thinks there is nothing to learn; and the boy who has finished Latin and done Geometry finds some- times his counterpart in the lad who has gone through Physiology. For this ttnfortunate state of mind many Text- books are, I believe, much to blame: difficulties are too often ignored, or opening vistas of knowledge resolutely kept out of view: the forbidden regions may be, it is true, too rough for the young student to be guided through, or as yet pathless for the pioneers of thought; but the opportunity to arouse the receptive mental attitude apt to be produced by the rec- ognition of the fact that much more still remains to be learned —to excite the exercise of the reasoning faculties upon dis- puted matters—and, in some of the better minds, to arouse the longing to assist in adding to knowledge, is an inesti- mable advantage, not to be lightly thrown aside through the desire to make an elegantly symmetrical book. While I trust, therefore, that this volume contains all the more impor- tant facts at present known about the working of our Bodies,