A brief memoir of Sir William Blizard ... surgeon ... read before the Hunterian Society, October 7th, 1835, with additional particulars of his life and writings / by William Cooke.

  • Cooke William, 1785-1873.
Date:
[1835]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A brief memoir of Sir William Blizard ... surgeon ... read before the Hunterian Society, October 7th, 1835, with additional particulars of his life and writings / by William Cooke. 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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    to form societies, and make compacts to bind them. The modes of such ancient compacts were different in almost every country, and suited to the peculiarities and particular circumstances of time and place. When men, by mutual commerce, became in some degree civilized, and humanity and all the social virtues glowed in their hearts, laws were frequently added to the original bond, whereby benevolence was enjoined on the members, and every sort of wrong, cruelty, and oppression forbad, on pain of corporal punishments and penalties. This was in days of old, when men young in society, knew, from nature and intuitive wisdom, that they were born free; that to be rescinded from that freedom, was to be robbed of the noblest privi- lege of existence; and that the true end of society could only be to strengthen the security of it, and that by the punishment of criminals in terror em. It is an eternal truth, that those, whose actions are repugnant to the principles of humanity and benevolence are enemies of freedom, e. g. suicide is a crime against nature, which supersedes all human institutions. No man, therefore, can give his life to any one; and he who would take it, not forfeited to his country, is a bloody tyrant. Every man protests against the seizing of his lawful property, and all things sacred authorize it. The robber then, is a despotic villain. Thus might I go on; suffice it that to be safe from such unnatural beings, the more honest and humane part of man- kind entered into the social compact. Recjes ex nobis non nos a regibus. An agreement and laws were nothing if not executed, and the occasion of the first compact pre- sently demanded the law's force, for rapine and plunder were still heard of. The people, then, nominated a certain number of select men to dispense justice ; and of these in many parts of the world, for the more convenient transaction of affairs, one singly was in- vested with superior power, a sort of prime minister, or executive officer, whom we, however, in plain English designate King. But the power of those was never considered as from themselves : In their own persons they were subjects of the law; (a distinction all