Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 1.djvu/44

 hat the greatest of all is to be found in the apathy of the resident medical men;, from whose cordial co-operation alone any thing of the kind can be expected. Any voluminous work, whether systematic or empirical, must, unavoidably, contain much useless, and some erroneous, matter. To after times it must be left to correct these errors, and prune these redundancies; but we cannot help expressing our regret, that even the germ of a general medical topography of our island has not yet appeared among us, and that we are left with little more than the bills of mortality, from which we can extract any information on the state of public health, of a vast proportion of our most populous cities and counties. From these empirical sources, we have reason to suppose that the loss of human life varies in different proportions, from 1 in 36, the average rate for Middlesex, down to 1 in 73, the calculation for Cardigan; but, for many of the causes of this striking difference, we are consigned to the obscurities and intricacies of conjecture."

I cannot help entertaining the cheering hope, that the members of this Association may, by directing their attention to this highly important investigation, no longer permit it to be said that, whilst the physicians of France, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Germany, and other continental states, have all contributed, more or less, to the formation of a national medical topography, England alone has done nothing, or next to nothing, on this subject.