Surgical Anatomy

PREFACE.

The object of this work is to present to the student of medicine and the
practitioner removed from the schools, a series of dissections
demonstrative of the relative anatomy of the principal regions of the
human body. Whatever title may most fittingly apply to a work with this
intent, whether it had better be styled surgical or medical, regional,
relative, descriptive, or topographical anatomy, will matter little,
provided its more salient or prominent character be manifested in its
own form and feature. The work, as I have designed it, will itself show
that my intent has been to base the practical upon the anatomical, and
to unite these wherever a mutual dependence was apparent.

That department of anatomical research to which the name topographical
strictly applies, as confining itself to the mere account of the form
and relative location of the several organs comprising the animal body,
is almost wholly isolated from the main questions of physiological and
transcendental interest, and cannot, therefore, be supposed to speak in
those comprehensive views which anatomy, taken in its widest
signification as a science, necessarily includes. While the anatomist
contents himself with describing the form and position of organs as they
appear exposed, layer after layer, by his dissecting instruments, he
does not pretend to soar any higher in the region of science than the
humble level of other mechanical arts, which merely appreciate the
fitting arrangement of things relative to one another, and combinative
to the whole design of the form or machine of whatever species this may
be, whether organic or inorganic. The descriptive anatomist of the human
body aims at no higher walk in science than this, and hence his
nomenclature is, as it is, a barbarous jargon of words, barren of all
truthful signification, inconsonant with nature, and blindly
irrespective of the cognitio certa ex principiis certis exorta.