Statement / by Dr. Murchison.

  • Murchison, Charles, 1830-1879.
Date:
[1863]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Statement / by Dr. Murchison. 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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    STATEMENT BY DR. MURCHISONv The paragraph in the Preface to my work on Fevers, alluding to Dr. Tweedie, refers to two distinct matters, which must not be confounded. i. The sentence referring to the first is as follows :— “Many of the tables contained in the essay referred to, to- gether with my remarks upon them, have been adopted by Dr. Tweedie, in his Lumleian lectures, published in the Lancet for 1880.” The essay in question was entitled, Contributions to the Etiology of Continued Fever, and was published in the forty-first volume of the Medico - Chirurgical Transactions (1858). The sentence in my preface simply states, that many of the tables and remarks in that essay have been adopted by Dr. Tweedie. In fact, no fewer than seven- teen pages (pp. 19-27, and 198-205) of the reprint of Dr. Tweedie’s lectures, containing the results of very elaborate statistical ana- lyses, are derived from this source. The remark in my preface was necessary; for though Dr. Tweedie acknowledges (pp. 198 and 200) that he is indebted for his statistical facts to my “published paperf he has occasionally adopted my reasonings and views, in the ipsissima verba of my printed essay, in such a manner as to lead his readers to think, that my remarks were his own observa- tions upon the facts collected by me. For example, the parallel columns appended below illustrate the use which has been made of my writings; they prove that Dr. Tweedie has been credited with having written a paragraph contained in my previously pub- lished essay; and they show that the very way in which he has introduced my name is calculated to disconnect me from the authorship of the passage. Still I did nothing more than state— that Dr. Tweedie had adopted my tables and remarks, and I did not in my preface, or in my part of my book, accuse him of pla- giarism. On the contrary, when referring in the body of my work (p. 606), to the passage quoted below, I observed that Dr. Tweedie had transcribed my words inadvertently: “ Dr. Tweedie, in his lectures on fevers published in the Lancet for 1860, has inadvertently transcribed, verbatim, my remarks on this subject, without, in this instance, indicating their source; consequently, a recent writer has been misled to quote, as from that author, a paragraph, which appeared in my essay in 1858.”