vi PREFACE 



destructive of all sound medical thought, and makes for 

 purely empirical practice. 



In the present book the first, so far as the writer 

 knows, of its kind an attempt has been made to apply 

 physiology to medicine in the same way as anatomy has 

 long been applied to surgery. Seeing that it is not 

 intended to be a substitute for physiological text-books, 

 but merely a companion to them, all descriptions of 

 methods have been omitted, and only the facts of 

 physiology dealt with, chief emphasis being laid upon 

 those which have a direct bearing upon clinical work; 

 incidentally these bearings are pointed out. 



The reader may be surprised at the small size of 

 the book, but when one deals only with the facts of 

 physiology, it is astonishing to find how little space they 

 occupy, and how few of them have as yet any direct 

 practical implications. It will be observed, too, that 

 there is no chapter on the muscular or nervous systems, 

 or on the special senses. These omissions are inten- 

 tional, for the writer is convinced that most of * nerve- 

 muscle ' physiology, as ordinarily taught to students, 

 is perfectly useless to the physician ; and, as regards the 

 nervous system and special senses, the time is not yet 

 ripe for writing their applied -physiology clinically, one 

 can as yet hardly make use of more than their applied 

 anatomy. 



As the book is designed only for students, and not 

 for specialists, few references to original sources have 

 been given ; but the writer feels that it is due to himself 

 to say that these have always been consulted, and that 

 the book really represents a very large amount of 



