Excerpt from Gall-Stones and Diseases of the Bile-Ducts This little book consists of a series of lectures delivered at the Middlesex Hospital. I venture to publish them because I am under the impression that cholelithiasis is inadequately considered in textbooks of surgery, and the available English monographs on this subject have grown too big to be useful for students. Since Tait's pioneer operation (1876) the literature relating to the operative treatment of gallstones has become bewildering in its magnitude: in spite of this activity many sufferers from cholelithiasis find their way into the deadhouse with their disease unrecognised and unrelieved. I do not contend that surgery is unerring in relieving "gall-stone patients," for in the last chapter will be found a statistical record (gathered from returns kindly furnished me by the Registrars) of operations performed for the relief of gall-stones in the general hospitals of London during 1905. This record shows that, even with the assistance of "asepsis," operations 011 the gall-bladder and bile-ducts cannot be described as free from risk. 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.