A Treatise on the diseases of the heart and great vessels : and on the affections which may be mistaken for them, comprising the author's view of the physiology of the heart's action / by J. Hope.

  • Hope, James, 1801-1841.
Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A Treatise on the diseases of the heart and great vessels : and on the affections which may be mistaken for them, comprising the author's view of the physiology of the heart's action / by J. Hope. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library at Emory University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library, Emory University.

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    ble have been so tardily published,* though I have habitually taught most of them to my class and in the hospital for several years, I can only reply by pleading my utter inability, even if there had been the inclination, to devote more than an average share of attention to any one subject;—an inability which rests upon all those who, to the private distractions of a laborious profession, add the onerous duties of hospital physicians and teachers of the practice of medicine. I can, indeed, truly say, with Senac and others, that I have worked slowly and painfully, inter ta^dia et labores, in fragments of time hardly re- deemed from excessive professional engagements. I have studied brevity to the utmost, my object always having been, to offer the pith of the whole subject in the smallest possible compass. For this rea- son, I have avoided the multiplication of prolix cases,—offering no new ones, except for the illustration of new points of doctrines. As, however, I have sometimes referred to numbers so large as might seem incredible without ex- planation, it may be proper to state, once for all, that, out of upwards of 15,000 hospital in and out patients, whom I have treated during the last eight, years, about seven per cent., as near as lean judge from a rough calculation,! ^iave laboured under organic disease of the heart,—making a total of 1050 cases, exclusive of those occurring in private practice. I have in several instances transferred to their proper sources discoveries which, in the first edition, I imagined to have belonged to myself. Any simi- lar oversights in the present edition I shall be happy to rectify, if the authors will oblige me with the information. I have, on the same principle, and, I trust, with perfect good feeling, ven- tured to reclaim for my countrymen and self a number of discoveries, which an eminent French writer, probably from unacquaintance with the English lan- guage and medical literature, has imagined to have emanated from himself. Finally, I have added a few plates, which I trust will be found convenient. I have to express my obligations to Mr. James Freeman for the excellent Alphabetical Index.J J. H. * Except the experiments on the sounds, published in the Appendix to the pre- vious edition, in April, 1835. t If I have leisure hereafter to sort these cases, I trust to give the exact per centage. X In an Appendix prefixed to this Index will be found the important autopsies of the cases of V ... ., Esq., and GofT.