Page:Manual of Antenatal Pathology and Hygiene.djvu/13



HAD hoped within the compass of one volume to have presented the whole subject of Antenatal Pathology and Hygiene. It was my purpose to have included not only the physiology and the diseases of the foetus, but also the monstrosities of the embryo and the morbid states of the germ. I have been compelled, however, to devote this volume to Foetal Physiology and Pathology alone, leaving Teratology and Morbid Heredity to be treated in a separate but a companion book, which may be regarded as Section II. of this Manual. To have done otherwise, would have been to swell the work to an unwieldy size and to delay its appearance unduly.

There have been many workers in this field of research, and their work has been most fruitful; but each investigator has seldom had an opportunity of studying more than a few specimens of foetal disease and deformity, and has, in consequence, been led to concentrate his attention upon the special pathological conditions which came in his way. I, on the other hand, have had the extraordinary fortune to be able personally to examine nearly three hundred specimens, embracing almost all the leading types of antenatal morbid states, and I have thus been enabled to take a somewhat wide view of the whole subject. Further, many other workers have been generously ready to put their own material at my disposal for inspection; and I have also read very widely the literature of the subject and of allied departments of medicine and biology.

I began this work in a spirit of something very like active curiosity, I have prosecuted it with an ever-deepening interest, and I have brought it thus far with the growing sense that I have been dealing with a subject of tremendous importance for the future of the race and the individual, with, in fact, preventive medicine in its simplest and most hopeful because in its earliest aspects. If we but knew the laws which govern antenatal health and the causes which produce antenatal disease and death, what might we not expect the possibilities of Hygiene to grow to!

In writing the book, I have honestly tried to avoid the four grounds