Volume 1

Handbook of geographical and historical pathology / by August Hirsch ; translated from the second German edition by Charles Creighton.

  • Hirsch, August, 1817-1894.
Date:
1883-1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Handbook of geographical and historical pathology / by August Hirsch ; translated from the second German edition by Charles Creighton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    mention in particular the recent series of Health Reports of the War Offices of England and the United States, and the ‘ Archives de medecine navale ’—have brought us much valuable information as to the Climate and Medical Anthropology of many large regions of the globe, which were formerly unknown in these respects, or known very imperfectly. We have also the copious epidemiographical literature of recent years, which has left hardly a single subject relating to Epidemics untouched, and whose treatment of them has been in most cases extremely thorough; this division also, like that of Medical Geography, has its special organs, among which I shall mention the Reports issued by the English Health Department, the Official Sanitary Reports for Sweden, and the ‘ Transactions of the Epidemiological Society of London.5 All such labours have not only added on the grand scale to our knowledge of the distribution of diseases in time and in place, and of the causal connexion between them and the human environment; but, moreover, these researches have been invested with a scientific value such as pertained to only a small part of the earlier writings in the field of Medical Geography; for the standpoint of observers at the present day is completely changed from what it used to be, representing as it does the latest form of pathological opinion. Nowadays we can estimate the health-conditions of many of the most remote parts of the world, in regard to morbid anatomy and etiology, with as much exactness as we were privileged to do not so very long ago, for none but the most civilised fetates of Europe and North America. It is unneces- sary for me to say how much we are likely to profit by this even in our knowledge of those matters of professional practice that concern us nearest home.