Excerpt from Diseases of the Digestive Tract and Their Treatment "Of the making of many books there is no end," was the dictum of Milton, and it is as true now as when written, or else why a preface, which seems an author's justification for launching another book to swell the multitude. His purpose may be one of three - to add something to human knowledge, to put in a pleasing and useful form that which is already known, or to promulgate or defend some pet theory or discovery of his own. My purpose is largely the second: to tell in a clear and not too fulsome fashion the facts pertaining to our branch of internal medicine - the digestive tract- without trying to exhaust any feature of it, whether it be its physiology or pathology, desirable objects, but worthy of a more extensive volume than mine can possibly be. The first object, though incidental, will also be attained in a limited degree, for no one can relate what he has observed in medicine without imparting some information which is not known, at least, to all physicians. While mankind is said to have had the same origin, yet rarely are two members of the human race exactly alike in physiognomy; similarly a disease may present the same general features, but at the same time afford individual differences. It is only by our acquaintance with these departures from the normal course of disease that we become well-rounded authorities, and every book containing any portion of its author's experience with pathological or clinical vagaries must necessarily, when consulted, enlarge our own perspective. In this work the didactic method is employed from its continued use by the author in class work rather than the deductive - commonly known as ease teaching - because the former allows a more complete picture of a disease to be presented, though it must be confessed it is often artificial, and the latter much better "holds the mirror up, to nature." The names of authorities are scantily mentioned in this treatise, since no hope of making an encyclopedia of it has ever occurred to the author - not because he feels under any the less obligations to those authorities for a mine of information, which no one man could have acquired alone in a lifetime. 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.