A TREATISE

ON

DISEASES OF THE JOINTS.

LANE LIBRARY

BY

RICHARD BARWELL, F.R.C.S.

ASSISTANT SURGEON, CHARING-CROSS HOSPITAL, ETC.

11686 329 1861

PREFACE.

NOTHING can be more useless than to apologize for publishing a book-if the work be not good enough, no excuse can improve it; and if it worthily fill a gap in the literature of its subject, an apology is unnecessary. A treatise on diseases of the joints equal to, or rather beyond, the current knowledge of the day, has long been required-my professional brethren must judge, whether the ensuing pages may supply the deficiency. No author is fit to estimate his own work at the moment of its completion, but it may be permitted me to say, that the study of joint-diseases has very much occupied my attention, even from my studentship, and that for the last six or seven years, my devotion to that subject has been almost unremitting. Those minute investigations into the morbid actions of synovial membrane, cartilage, and bone, with which, by the publication of papers in various Quarterly and Monthly periodicals, my name is connected, were not undertaken so much from love for that sort of work as from a perception that certain links must be supplied, certain entanglements unravelled, and error, if any existed, corrected. The real weight of my work has been at the bedside, and the greatest labour devoted to interpreting symptoms, and remedying their cause. A