Excerpt from An Essay on Hospital Mortality The discussion on Hospitalism raised by Sir James Y. Simpson was unfortunately cut short by his death. His papers were placed -in my hands by his son, but I found so little that had not been used by him, that I felt that any further investigation of the subject must be prefaced by research in another direction. The statistics of amputations, upon which Sir James founded most of his argument, have not been disputed as far as those derived from hospitals are concerned. Those which were contributed by private practitioners were, how ever, manifestly open to the objection that the records might be imperfect; and, at least, that they were not sufficiently extended to be convincing. I have sifted the original returns very carefully, and am quite certain that, save in one instance, they are all above the suspicion of intentional or even of careless misstatement. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.