interest. The forelying volume appears to be the first thorough
attempt to classify and epitomize the literature of this nature.
It has been our purpose to briefly summarize and to arrange in
order the records of the most curious, bizarre, and abnormal
cases that are found in medical literature of all ages and all
languages--a thaumatographia medica. It will be readily seen that
such a collection must have a function far beyond the
satisfaction of mere curiosity, even if that be stigmatized with
the word "idle." If, as we believe, reference may here be found
to all such cases in the literature of Medicine (including
Anatomy, Physiology, Surgery, Obstetrics, etc.) as show the most
extreme and exceptional departures from the ordinary, it follows
that the future clinician and investigator must have use for a
handbook that decides whether his own strange case has already
been paralleled or excelled. He will thus be aided in determining
the truth of his statements and the accuracy of his diagnoses.
Moreover, to know extremes gives directly some knowledge of
means, and by implication and inference it frequently does more.
Remarkable injuries illustrate to what extent tissues and organs
may be damaged without resultant death, and thus the surgeon is
encouraged to proceed to his operation with greater confidence
and more definite knowledge as to the issue. If a mad cow may
blindly play the part of a successful obstetrician with her
horns, certainly a skilled surgeon may hazard entering the womb
with his knife. If large portions of an organ,--the lung, a
kidney, parts of the liver, or the brain itself,--may be lost by
accident, and the patient still live, the physician is taught the
lesson of nil desperandum, and that if possible to arrest disease
of these organs before their total destruction, the prognosis and
treatment thereby acquire new and more hopeful phases.