An account of the first meeting of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, held in the board room of the Worcester Infirmary, on Thursday, July 19th, 1832, : containing an address, delivered by Charles Hastings, M. D. together with a correct report of the proceedings at the meeting.

Date:
[1832]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An account of the first meeting of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, held in the board room of the Worcester Infirmary, on Thursday, July 19th, 1832, : containing an address, delivered by Charles Hastings, M. D. together with a correct report of the proceedings at the meeting. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of the resident medical men, from whose cordial co-operation alone any thing of the kind can be expected. Any voluminous work, whether sys¬ tematic or empirical, must, unavoidably, contain much useless, and some erroneous, matter. To after times it must be left to correct these errors, and prune these redundancies; but we cannot help expressing our regret, that even the germ of a general medical topography of our island has not yet appeared among us, and that we are left with little more than the bills of mortality, from which we can extract any information on the state of public health, of a vast proportion of our most populous cities and counties. From these empi¬ rical sources, we have reason to suppose that the loss of human life varies in different proportions, from 1 in 36, the average rate for Middlesex, down to 1 in 73, the calculation for Cardigan ; but, for many of the causes of this striking differ¬ ence, we are consigned to the obscurities and intricacies of conjecture;” I cannot help entertaining the cheering hope, that the members of this Association may, by directing their attention to this highly important investigation, no longer permit it to be said that, whilst the physicians of France, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Germany, and other conti¬ nental states, have all contributed, more or less, to the formation of a national medical topogra¬ phy, England alone has done nothing, or next to nothing, on this subject. In a densely populated and manufacturing country, where the elements for this sort of inquiry must abound almost more than in any other, it is
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