The Works, Literary, Moral, and Medical, of Thomas Percival, M.D.: Volume 4 To Which Are Prefixed, Memoirs of his Life and Writings, and a Selection from his Literary Correspondence

A physician and medical reformer enthused by the scientific and cultural progress of the Enlightenment as it took hold in Britain, Thomas Percival (1740–1804) wrote on many topics, including public health and demography. His influential Medical Ethics (also reissued in this series) is considered the first modern formulation. In 1807, his son Edward published this four-volume collection of his father's diverse work. Some of the items here had never been published before, including a selection of Percival's private correspondence and a biographical account written by Edward. Volume 4 contains the third and fourth parts of Percival's Essays Medical and Experimental, which were completed following the revised edition that is reissued separately in one volume in the Cambridge Library Collection. The essays reflect Percival's wide range of interests, such as the regulation of hospitals and prisons, and the medical abnormalities he sometimes observed in his patients.

Part III: Preface; Observations on the state of population in Manchester and other adjacent pages; On the small-pox and measles; On the different quantities of rain, which fall at different heights over the same spot of ground; On the solution of human calculi by fixed air; On the nature and composition of urinary calculi; On the effects of foxed air on the colours and vegetation of plants; On the action of different manures; On different absorbents; On the internal regulation of hospitals; Miscellaneous observations, cases and inquiries; Part IV: Preface; On a new and cheap method of preparing pot-ash; On the fatal effects of pickles impregnated with copper; Speculations on the perceptive power of vegetables; Facts and queries relative to attraction and repulsion; Narrative of the sufferings of a collier; A physical inquiry into the powers and operations of medicines; On the solvent powers of camphor; Medical cautions and remarks; On the medicinal uses of cod liver oil; On the nature, cause, and cure of the rabies canina; Miscellaneous facts and observations; Miscellaneous practical observations; An account of an earthquake; On the silk cotton of Sumatra; On the acid of tar; On the construction and polity of prisons; Remarks relative to the improvement of the Manchester Infirmary; Index.