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ADVERTISEMENT

TO THE SECOND EDITION.

In the preparation of the Second Edition of these Lectures, the whole work has been carefully revised: a few formulæ have been introduced, and a minute alphabetical index has been appended: while additions, amounting altogether to fifty pages, have been made wherever I felt that more extended observation, or more careful reflection, had enabled me to supply some of those deficiencies which, I am well aware, are still far too numerous. The work now contains the results of 640 observations, and 199 post-mortem examinations, chiefly made among 16,276 children who came under my notice during the ten years of my connection with the Children's Infirmary in Lambeth.

Should hereafter a third edition be called for, I trust to prove that I have not been unmindful of the duties and responsibilities imposed on me by the honour of being appointed one of the medical officers to the Hospital for Sick Children; an institution which, it is hoped, will henceforth afford to the profession a field for the minute and accurate observation of the diseases of early life, such as neither dispensary nor private practice can offer even to those most earnest in the cultivation of medical knowledge.

96 WIMPOLE STREET,

December 20, 1851.

PREFACE

TO THE FIRST EDITION.

THE substance of a considerable part of the following Lectures was addressed to the pupils of the Middlesex Hospital in the summer of 1847, and the form of lectures appeared to me to present advantages which led me to retain it, when I determined to publish the results of my observations on Children's Diseases.

These observations were made in the large field presented by the Children's Infirmary, which was first thrown open to me in the year 1839, by the kindness of my friend Dr. Willis, then physician to that institution; to which office I succeeded on his resignation in 1842. Very nearly 14,000 children have thus been brought under my notice during the past nine years; and I have kept accurate notes of the diseases of 600, as well as of the results of 180 dissections of cases in which those diseases terminated fatally.

The time that has elapsed since the appearance of these Lectures in the Medical Gazette, has been too short to allow me, in preparing them for separate publication, to do much toward supplying those deficiencies in them of which I am fully sensible. If life and health be spared me, it will be my constant endeavour to render those imperfections less numerous. I trust they may not be of a nature to detract seriously from the usefulness of the work; still less of a kind to lead into error those to whom it has been my earnest wish to prove myself a faithful guide.

96 WIMPOLE STREET,

September 20, 1848.

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