Excerpt from The British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review, or Quarterly Journal of Practical Medicine and Surgery, Vol. 28: July-October, 1861

Attheendot'thisagreeablevolume, we find a recapitulation ofthe dificrent benevolent project; of Herrera, embodied in fourteen propo sitions. Part of the first is a recommendation that there should be wards for convalescents established in connexion with all the hospitals in the kingdom, in order that the patients should not be subj ected to removal while still languid and debilitated, and therefore exposed to sufl'ering from want, as well as prone to encounter relapse or even fatal injury. In 1649, an establishment of this kind, we should add, was actually founded in Madrid by Don Antonio Contreras giving an example of a wise and kindly provision, for which philanthropists elsewhere are still too frequently striving unsuccessfully. It is lea pertinent to our subject to mention here, that in his sixth proposition he introduces a plan for augmenting and manning the navy, for the advantage of the nation because, he remarks, it is certain that the country that is master at sea will be master on land. In an epilogue, appended to the whole, he gives a summary of his services and his losses, showing that, in his zeal for the common welfare, he had om pended time which he might have devoted gainfully to his own interests, and that he had published and widely distributed forty larger or smaller treatises, eight of which were medical the whole at a direct cost to himself of 4000 ducats, besides his other and greater sacrifices. Yet on this occasion, his object seems more to plead for a furtherance of his schemes by the State, than for a requital to himself.* A maxim in his Compendium of the Theory of Physic shows well the tendencies of the Spanish school of medicine, in its higher views and aspects, in at least the earlier portion of his time, and his own participation in them. The physician is not, he says, to involve himself in the discus sion of sophistical or metaphysical entities, or in perplexed syllogisms or subtleties, but 18 to occupy himself wholly with solid ph ilosophy, and with medical theory and practice. It would have been well if advice so sagacious had not been soon afterwards forgotten almost wholly by his countrymen.

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