Owen's Moral Physiology

Synopsis

The reader, after having been taxed with the perusal of two prefaces before reaching the subject matter, may consider it a hardship to be further called upon to read a somewhat lengthy introduction, when the title of a book should be its best preface; but the Editor would ask your indulgence while he briefly states the object and design of the following pages.

It has often been held of questionable propriety, whether the public should be furnished with medical readings, it being presumed that such literature tended to thwart the very purposes it professed to encourage: that, instead of affording an exposition of the ills of our nature, whereby we might avoid or remove them, its effect necessarily, from the probable absence of all preliminary medical knowledge on the part of the reader, was but to create confusion and alarm, and, even where understood, only to magnify the fear; and this latter notion is grounded on the popular error, that even professional men, from the same cause, are least efficient when in attendance upon themselves.

Similar Bookshelves