THE BRITISH AND FOREIGN MEDICO-CHIRURGICAL REVIEW. JULY, 1872. Analytical and Critical Reviews. I-The Works of Sir J. Y. Simpson, Bart. Vol. II.1 THE papers collected in this second volume of Sir James Simpson's works are somewhat heterogeneous, and their common authorship would seem to be almost the only connecting link between them. They have all, with the possible exception of a few lecture-notes, been published before; those on Hospitalism, and the Stamping out of Contagious Disease, so recently as to be familiar to most of our readers. The elaborate essay on Hermaphroditism is a reprint of the well-known article in the "Cyclopædia of Anatomy and Physiology," published in 1839. The remaining subject of Anesthesia was one in which Sir James Simpson took a peculiar interest, and with which his name will always be honourably connected. At the present day, when means are being rapidly multiplied for the alleviation of human suffering, it will not be uninteresting or uninstructive to be taken back some five-and-twenty years, and to read of the opposition offered to the introduction of Anæsthetics, and of the prejudice against their employment which existed even in the most enlightened ranks of the profession. It is much to be regretted that Sir James Simpson was not spared that he might himself have condensed the scattered facts on this subject into a continuous narrative; as it is, we can but sympathise with the editor in the difficulties of dealing with a mass of papers addressed to different persons or journals on the same subject, in which the same argument occurs over and over again, with a tiresome iteration, often the same words with a slightly different setting; some, as sharp retorts despatched across the Atlantic in reply to the angry and not over-courteous remarks of Dr. Bigelow; some, addressed from a sick bed to 1 Anasthesia, Hospitalism, Hermaphroditism, and a proposal to stamp out Smallpox and other Contagious Diseases. Edited by Sir W. G. SIMPSON, Bart., Scholar of Gonville and Caius Coll., Cambridge. 99-L. 1 |