Excerpt from Common Disorders and Diseases of Childhood The original plan of this work was the putting together of lectures delivered at King's College Hospital and at the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street; and in accordance therewith I had intended to call the volume Lectures on Diseases of Children'. But as the patchwork grew it became evident that, if it was to be in any sense a connected whole, it would be well to combine with the lectures other clinical studies, which had been written at various times for other purposes. Some of these studies, as also of the lectures, have appeared already in medical journals or in hospital reports, but only very few in the form in which they now appear, for larger experience has called for modifications and additions, and I have not scrupled to mutilate and transform my progeny until they bear scarce the semblance of their former selves. For the most part, however, these chapters appear now for the first time, and having abandoned my original scheme, I was at a loss to find a name for my farrago libelli It is no systematic treatise, it has no claim to vie with the many textbooks which deal with the whole subject of disease in childhood, nor indeed is it written on the lines which a systematic work demands; I have chosen rather to be selective and discursive as it suited my bent; I have dis regarded altogether that sense of proportion and perspective which is of the very essence of a systematic textbook. 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.