Volume 1

A system of obstetric medicine and surgery : theoretical and clinical for the student and practitioner / by Robert Barnes and Fancourt Barnes.

Date:
1884-1885
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A system of obstetric medicine and surgery : theoretical and clinical for the student and practitioner / by Robert Barnes and Fancourt Barnes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    which crowns the treatment is often the most instructive element in the case. To abandon this source of knowledge is to contract at once the means of cultivating pathological know- ledge, diagnostic power, and therapeutical skill. The obstetrist is, of necessity, a surgeon as well as a physician. ■ The scheme of the work is fairly set out for the first volume in the analytical index attached to it; and the whole scheme is sketched in the ' Synoptical Gruide to the Study of Ob- stetrics,' by Robert Barnes. The leading idea has been to pursue a natm-al order, based on the sequence or evolution of the processes of gestation, parturition, and puerpery. To fully realise this idea is a difficulty which everyone who has tried to write a systematic work on any subject will readily acknowledge. It is impossible to adhere rigidly to any plan without repetition and overlapping, or without in some in- stances breaking up a subject which would be better under- stood if studied in its entirety. And, again, it is often impossible to fairly present the special topic under discussion without introducing episodical illustrations drawn from topics not strictly connected. For example, hsemorrhage occurs during gestation, labour, and childbed. Although certain characteristic differences mark the htemorrhages in each of these periods, these difierences are better seized when de- scribed in direct contrast. The fundamental laws which govern all haemorrhages will thus stand out in more instructive prominence. Yet obedience to this order imposes this di- lemma : either to omit from the history of gestation more than a provisional indication of the haemorrhages which occur during that period, or to introduce in its seemingly natural place a full account of these haemorrhages, and then to repeat that account when tracing the connected history of hsemorrhage. Many new illustrations will be found. We have been careful to give the source whence the borrowed ones are taken, and have appended our names to those drawn by our- selves.