Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/853

Rh M O R M R 823 enjoyed much repute in its day ; Haller speaks of it as &quot;an im mortal work, which may in itself serve for a pathological library. Morgagni, in the preface to his own work, discusses the defects and merits of the Sc2ndchrctuin, ; it was largely a compilation of other men s cases, well and ill authenticated; it was prolix, often inaccurati and misleading from ignorance of the normal anatomy, and it wai wanting in what would now be called objective impartiality, a quality which was introduced as decisively into morbid anatomy by Morgagni as it had been introduced two centuries earlier into normal human anatomy by Yesalius. Morgagni has narrated the circumstances under which the De Scdibu-s took origin. Having finished his edition of Valsalva in 1740, he was taking a holiday in the country, spending much of his time in the company of a young friend who was curious in many branches of knowledge. The conversation turned upon the Sepidchrctum of lionet, and it was suggested to Morgagni by his dilettante friend that he should put on record his own observations. It was agreed that letters on the anatomy of diseased organs and parts should be written for the perusal of this favoured youth (whose name does not transpire) ; and they were continued from time to time until they numbered seventy. Those seventy letters constitute the DC Scdibus ct Causis &amp;lt;}[orborum,, which was given to the world as a systematic treatise in 2 vols. folio, Venice, 1761, twenty years after the task of epis tolary instruction was begun. The letters are arranged in rive books, treating of the morbid conditions of the body a capita ad calccm. The rive books are dedicated respectively to Trew, Brom- field, Senac, Schreiber, and Meckel, as representing the several learned societies of which Morgagni was a foreign member. The five books together contain, according to an enumeration by the present writer, the records of some 640 dissections. Some of these are given at great length, and with a precision of statement and ex- haustiveness of detail hardly surpassed in the so-called &quot;protocols&quot; of the German pathological institutes of the present time ; others, again, are fragments brought in to elucidate some question that had arisen. The symptoms during the course of the malady and other antecedent circumstances are always prefixed with more or less ful ness, and discussed from the point of view of the conditions found , ifter death. Subjects in all ranks of life, including several cardinals, figure in this remarkable gallery of the dead. Many of the cases are taken from Morgagni s early experiences at Bologna, and from the records of his teachers Valsalva and Albertini not elsewhere published. Those six hundred or more cases are selected and arranged with method and purpose, and they are often (and some what casually) made the occasion of a long excursus on general pathology and therapeutics. The range of Morgagni s scholarship, as evidenced by his references to early and contemporary literature, strikes one with astonishment. It has been contended that he was himself not free from prolixity, the besetting sin of the learned ; and certainly the form and arrangement of his treatise are such as to make it difficult to use in the present day, notwithstanding that it is well indexed in the original edition, in that of Tissot (3 vols. 4to, Yverdun, 1779), and in more recent editions. It differs from modern treatises in so far as the symptoms determine the order and manner of presenting the anatomical facts. Although Morgagni was the first to understand and to demonstrate the absolute necessity of basing diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment on an exact and com prehensive knowledge of anatomical conditions, he made no attempt (like that of the Vienna school sixty years later) to exalt pathological anatomy into a science disconnected from clinical medicine and remote from practical needs. His orderliness of anatomical method (implying his skill with the scalpel), his precision, his exhaustive- ness, and his freedom from bias are his essentially modern or scientific qualities ; his scholarship and high consideration for classical and foreign work, his sense of practical ends (or his common sense), and the breadth of his intellectual horizon prove him to have lived before medical science had become largely technical or mechanical. It is clear that Morgagni s immense personal influence during his lifetime did not alone make his book famous ; at a distance of two hundred years from his birth, and more than one hundred from his death, the opinion is unanimous that his treatise was the commencement of the era of steady or cumulative progress in pathology and in practical medicine. Symptoms from that time ceased to be made up into more or less conventional groups, each of which was a disease ; on the other hand, they began to be viewed as &quot; the cry of the suffering organs,&quot; and it now became possible to develop Sydenham s grand conception of a natural history of disease in a catholic or scientific spirit. Laennec s application of the stetho scope to detect the sounds given out in diseased states of the heart and lungs, and Bright s application of the test-tube and re-agents to reach the structural and functional conditions of the kidney through the state of the urine, were the direct results of Morgagni s endeavour to lay bare the seats and causes of disease by anatomy ; and those two means of diagnosis are the daily and hourly resource of every modern practitioner. In more general terms, Morgagni s work substituted localization for generalization and precision for vagueness. A biography of Morgagni by Mosca was published at Naples in 17(58. His life may also be read in Fabroni s Vltx illustr. Italor., and a convenient abridi;- ment of tabroms memoir will be found prefixed to Tissot s edition of the He Sedibus, &.c. A collected edition of his works was published at Venice in live vols. tolio in 1TC5. /Q ^ MORGAN, SYDNEY OWENSON, LADY (1777 M859), novelist and miscellaneous describer and critic, was one of the most vivid and hotly-discussed literary personages of her generation. She was the daughter of an Irish actor, but it was one of her whims to keep the year of her birth a secret ; &quot; once upon a time &quot; on Christmas day was her answer to inquiries. She began her literary career with a precocious volume of poems. Her second venture, St Clair (1804), a novel of ill-judged marriage, ill-starred love, and impassioned nature-worship, in which the influence of Goethe and Rousseau was apparent, at once attracted attention. Another novel, The Novice of St Dominick (1806), was also praised for its qualities of copious imagina tion and description, though the critics were inclined to nibble at the writer s grammar. But the book which made her reputation and brought her name into warm con troversy was The Wild Irish Girl, also published in 1806. In this she appeared as the ardent champion of her native country, a politician rather than a novelist, extolling the beauty of Irish scenery, the richness of the natural wealth of Ireland, the noble traditions of its early history, and sketching types of the various classes with direct refer ence to the misgovernment to which she traced their evil features. She followed this up with Patriotic Sketches and Metrical Fragments in 1807, fitting some Irish melodies with words (&quot;Kate Kearney&quot; among the number) in the same year in which Moore began a similar task. Miss Owen- son s politics and the favour shown her by the Whig aristocracy probably prompted the savage attack made upon her next novel, Ida, a Woman of Athens, in the first number of the Quarterly (1809). From first to last her style was open to the reproach of being made up too mucli of quotations, and her grammar was not always correct ; but exuberant humour, keen wit, and fertility in the inven tion of striking and romantic incidents carry any unbiassed reader easily over all minor faults of composition. Her great ambition was to draw vivid pictures of the mingled &quot; mirth and misery, ferocity and fun,&quot; of the Irish under English rule, and she succeeded. Her novels suffer as stories from this political purpose ; she drags in too many character-sketches, and, though they are always drawn with vivacity and sharp penetration, they are drawn with too much bias of romantic enthusiasm on the one side and satirical spite on the other. In 1812 she was married to Sir T. C. Morgan, but books still continued to flow from her facile pen. In 1814 she produced her best novel, O Donnel, a decided advance on previous work. She published an elaborate study of France under the Bourbon restoration in 1817. This was attacked with outrageous fury in the Quarterly, the authoress being accused of Jacobinism, falsehood, licentiousness, and im piety. She took her revenge indirectly in the novel of Florence Macarthy (1818), in which a Quarterly reviewer, Con Crawley, is insulted with supreme feminine ingenuity. Italy, a companion work to her France, was published in 1821 ; Lord Byron bears testimony to the justness of its pictures of life. The results of Italian historical studies were given in her Life and Times of Salvator Rosa (1824). Then she turned again to Irish manners and politics with a matter-of-fact book on Absenteeism (1825), and a highly stirring and romantic novel, The O Briens ami the O Fla- hertys (1827). The Book of the Boudoir (1829) consisted of miscellaneous reflexions and reminiscences. Under the ministry of Lord Grey Lady Morgan obtained a pension of 300. During the last thirty years of her long life she jroke no new ground, but to the last she was an entertain ing writer, and sent some sprightly verses to the Athenaeum