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Excerpt from Criticisms and Controversies Relating to the Nervous and Muscular Systems I regret for the reader's sake, as well as for my own, that any personal matters should have a place in this paper, but as this is unavoidable, scientific reference, facts, and illustrations from different points of the medical compass, shedding a degree of light on some of the dim paths in the tangled forest of physiology. Content with the approval, the encouragement, the generous efforts to disseminate my researches, hitherto extended to me in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Louisville, Lexington, Charleston, New Orleans, and elsewhere, I had determined not to reply to foreigners - not even to Dr. Hall, whose communication in the New York Journal of Medicine for January, of the current year, though restricted to eight lines, is marvellously exuberant with animosity, nay, it is positively belligerent. It is intended in another part of this paper, to take a slight observation on his parallax in the neurological heavens. There is, indeed, no necessity that I should return railing for railing, were I so inclined. - The retribution of his own countrymen is coming apace." About midsummer, a medical gentleman of New Orleans, called my attention to the Medico-Chirurgical Review for April of the current year, in which I found an attack upon myself, implicating my American friends, - an attack in which that journal has greatly departed from its accustomed rules of sound criticism. My determination was now changed. It seemed due to truth - due to the distinguished American critics, who with scarcely a dissenting voice, had pronounced in favor of the originality of my experiments on muscular contractility - due to myself, to attempt a reply. Two methods presented themselves; - first to publish the residue of my experiments, with a generalized view of the whole, leaving my trans-Atlantic critics to their own consciences, and ta the soothing influences of time. But, then, if fifty cases will not convince unbelievers, neither will one hundred. I therefore determined to adopt the only remaining method, that is, to meet my opponents in their own way, to abandon things for words, experiments for logical abstractions, entities for theories, with, however, an occasional fact, the ponderosity of which might serve to keep the controversy from flying beyond the influence of gravitation and materialism; for, it will be seen, that the neurologists have entered their protest against "material studies." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
