The muscles and their story, from the earliest times : including the whole text of Mercurialis, and the opinions of other writers ancient and modern, on mental and bodily development / by John W.F. Blundell.

Date:
1864
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The muscles and their story, from the earliest times : including the whole text of Mercurialis, and the opinions of other writers ancient and modern, on mental and bodily development / by John W.F. Blundell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    rendered even a free translation equally unacceptable. And this may be said without any disparagement what- ever of the elegant and classical author, whose work was truly the labour of a life, condensing, as it does, from nearly two hundred ancient writers, all that they have written in favour of applying bodily exercise not only to the purposes of health but to the treatment of disease, It is sought in these pages simply to render the modern reader familiar with what the. ancients thought of the art they had originated and the numerous medical appliances of which it was susceptible. It has been no small or little anxious labour, the arrangement of all these particulars, scattered as they are through no less than six books; to divest them of obsolete argument without impairing their sense, as well as to make them subservient to the knowledge of the present day. Oftentimes the obscurity both of the ancient and more modern writer rendered the task extremely difficult, for the desire has been to record in intelligible language what the ancient authors said and meant on this subject, without departing from the strict text of Mercurialis. To have presented their somewhat crude notions on points which modern physiology has already disposed of would have been to render the work not only unsavoury to the student but practically useless to the general reader. Here, in truth, lay the difficulties which beset the repro-