VI PREFACE. 



do this or that, when they can themselves clearly 

 see and understand its necessity and the manner 

 Aoir, and reason why, that necessity exists than 

 when they have no other authority than the 

 dictum of another, however high their respect 

 for his knowledge and judgment may be. Neither, 

 as I think, should medical men take offence at 

 the publication^ of such a work ; as it would have 

 a direct tendency to ennoble their profession to 

 render it purely scientific and to divest it of that 

 mystification by which it was formerly so much 

 disgraced, and of which a portion still remains. 

 If patients themselves had a clear general acquaint- 

 ance with their own internal machinery of the 

 nature of the several offices intended to be fulfilled 

 by the several parts of that machinery, and of the 

 nature of disease in general ; and when, with their 

 mind's eye, they looked into themselves, and beheld 

 the complicated and delicate clock-work every 

 wheel in motion, every spring in operation all 

 acting in concert, and all tending to one purpose, yet 

 requiring only the slightest imprudent interference 

 to throw the whole into disorder and irreparable 

 confusion when, I say, they saw all this, they 

 could not but feel and acknowledge, that so beau- 

 tiful, complicated, and wonderful a machine could 



