Woman, her diseases and remedies : a series of letters to his class / by Charles D. Meigs.

  • Meigs, Charles D. (Charles Delucena), 1792-1869.
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Woman, her diseases and remedies : a series of letters to his class / by Charles D. Meigs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

    11/730
    AN INTRODUCTORY LETTER TO A FRIEND. Dear Sir : I send you a new Medical book, which I beg you to accept as a testimonial of my respect and affection. I have not dedicated it to you, because it belongs to the Gentlemen to whom I addressed the Letters of which the volume consists. I shall be obliged to you if you will look at it and tell me whether you think I have committed an unpardonable breach of the forms of our Science, in writing with such a freedom and abandon as you shall here find; for I might say with Juvenal— Quicquid agunt homines ; votum, timor, ira voluptas, Gaudia, discursus, nostri est farrago libelli. Dr. Forbes, in his farewell article, in the British and Foreign Medical Review, tells us it is a lamentable truth that the eminent practitioners of England neither read nor buy medical books; and I fear a chief reason of it is to be found in the dulness and jargon which charac- terize so many medical writings. I am sure that, exclusive of such as treat of the Physiology of Man, many of them are very tiresome and disgusting, for the Doctors seem uot to have heeded the lines of Horace, who says :— Omne tulit purjcturn qui miscuit utile dulci, Lectorem delectando pariterque monendo. According to my poor ability, I have endeavored in these Letters, while telling the truth about our Science and Art, to avoid the dulness; and, in doing so, I have ever thought the honestest way for a man to speak is to speak what he thinks, in his own tone and manner, and not to come before the public under a false disguise. The young gentlemen who composed my Class were accustomed, all winter, to hear me say just whatever the occasion prompted me to say to them, without any reservation of mine, from distrust of them ; for I went into the Lecture- room with my heart in my hand open before them, and it is in the