Sketches of the lives and works of the honorary medical staff of the Manchester Infirmary, from its foundation in 1752 to 1830, when it became the Royal Infirmary / by Edward Mansfield Brockbank.

  • Brockbank, E. M. (Edward Mansfield), 1866-
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Sketches of the lives and works of the honorary medical staff of the Manchester Infirmary, from its foundation in 1752 to 1830, when it became the Royal Infirmary / by Edward Mansfield Brockbank. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    The books Ferriar thus regrets are the Histories of Parismus and Parismenos—a child's boolc—of the Seven Champions, and Reynard the Fox, and the Academy of CompHments—all very scarce and rare when the Bibliomania was written. The essay on the Varieties of men, which was published with his Illustrations of Sterne, is a humorous criticism of the various accounts extant in literature, of peculiarly formed races of men. He characterises as profound and solid lying, the descriptions in Pliny and other writers, of people with feet turned the wrong way; or with feet so big that they served as umbrellas or parasols when the men were lying down; of people with no heads, their eyes being in their shoulders; of others with no mouths, who were nourished by the smell of fruits and flowers, etc. The various stories of human beings with tails also come in for jocular notice, but Ferriar's similar criticisms of the pygmies and tailed genus of hominum caudatum that lived in the mountains and forests of Borneo, according to the celebrated Dr. Harvey, raise a smile to-day against Ferriar. The tailed man thus scoffed at is^ undoubtedly, the orang-utang. But Ferriar was justi- fied in his general criticisms, and had real grounds