Copy 1, Volume 1

Select dissertations on several subjects of medical science / By Sir Gilbert Blane, bart. Now first collected, with alterations and additions; together with several new and original articles.

Gilbert Blane

Date:: 1833

Credit: Select dissertations on several subjects of medical science / By Sir Gilbert Blane, bart. Now first collected, with alterations and additions; together with several new and original articles. Source: Wellcome Collection.

21/404 page 3

$Before entering on the subject in the limited period which I have prescribed to myself, some account of it in former ages, and among other nations, will throw much curious and important light on it, as compared with the state of it in our own age and country. It has been the remark of all ages, that a life at sea, is through the difficulties, dangers, and hardships inseparable from it, more removed than any other from the ordinary course of human life. Homer says, Ov yap eycoye rt, t, Kd/cwrepov, aXXo OaXaaarig ’'AvSpa T£ <tvyyeuai ft /cat p,a\a KaprepoQ uri Horn. Odyss. and Horace in a passage familiar to every scholar thus denounces a life at sea “ Illi robur et ces triplex'— But how greatly have these evils, repulsive as they are, been compensated, by calling forth some of the most exalted virtues and talents of our nature, awakening those high capacities which could only find a field in the cultivation of those moral, physical and intellectual attainments, which have empowered man to assert his domi- nion over the habitable world, enabling him to establish an intercourse of every part of it with every other part, and even to encompass the planet assigned for his habitation. * Thus translated by Pope. Dire is the Ocean, dread in all its forms, “ Man must decay, when Man contends with Storms/*$