Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 4.djvu/323

 Rh the most satisfactory as well as the most authentic mode of presenting this testimony to the reader, will be by giving a few extracts from the letters of some of my medical friends, in reply to some queries I submitted to them, bearing in a more exclusive manner on the health and diseases of the miners. If the remarks in some of these anticipate, in some degree, inquiries hereafter to be gone into respecting the nature of the pulmonary diseases of miners, it will, I conceive, be better to run the risk of repetition, than to weaken the impression conveyed by these documents. In regard to these, I think it but justice to the authors to state, that the letters were not written under the expectation of being published: being all, however, the productions of men of education and long experience, they will not be considered less valuable on that account.

From Dr. Wise, of Helston.—The first of the two following extracts is from a letter written so long back as 1824, and addressed to me from Edinburgh, to which place Dr. Wise had proceeded for the purpose of taking a degree in medicine, after having practised long and very extensively in the centre of the mining district of Cornwall. The second is from a letter dated in 1833, from Helston, in the west of Cornwall, in which place Dr. Wise has practised as a physician, since his graduation at Edinburgh. I make no apology to or for Dr. Wise, for the repetition, in the second letter, of several of the statements in the first, because this very repetition (of which, after so long an interval, the writer was unconscious) is a satisfactory proof of the strength of the writer's convictions, and of the accuracy of his statements.