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PREFACE.

When I first signified my intention of publishing the followingsheets, I was told by my friends it would draw on me the resentmentof the whole faculty. As I never could entertain such an unworthyidea of physicians, I was resolved to make the experiment, whichindeed came out pretty much as might have been expected. By themore selfish and narrow-minded part of the faculty, the performancewas condemned ; while many of those whose learning and liberalityof sentiments do honor to medicine, received it in a manner whichat once showed their indulgence, and the falsehood of the commonopinion, that all physicians wish to conceal their art.

The reception which the book met with from the public was stillmore flattering, and deserves my most grateful acknowledgments.A persuasion that such a performance might be useful, and was evenwished for by the public, encouraged me to print a large impression ;but my most sanguine expectations could never have suggested thatabove five thousand copies would have been sold in a corner of Britainbefore another edition could be got ready.

A sense of gratitude, which public approbation seldom fails toinspire, induced me to bestow some pains to make the book moregenerally useful, by enlarging the Prophylaxis, or that part whichtreats of preventing diseases, and likewise adding several diseaseswhich were entirely omitted in the former impression. This inevi-tably retarded the publication of the second edition, and has likewisedrawn it out to a greater length than could have been wished ; butthese inconveniences will, I hope, be excused, as the book is certainlyrendered less incomplete.

The observations relative to nursing and the management of chil-dren were chiefly suggested by an extensive practice among infants,in a large branch of the Foundling Hospital, where I had an oppor-tunity not only of treating the diseases incident to childhood, butlikewise of trying the different plans of nursing, and observing theireffects. "Whenever I had it in my power to place the children underthe care of proper nurses, to instruct these nurses in their duty, andto be satisfied that they performed it, very few of them died; butwhen, from distance of place, and other unavoidable circumstances,the children were left to the sole care of mercenary nurses, withoutany one to instruct or superintend them, scarce any of them lived.

This was so apparent as, with me, to amount to a proof of thefollowing melancholy fact : that almost one half of the human species

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