Excerpt from The Rectum: Its Diseases and Developmental Defects A former work, The Rectum and Anus, their Diseases and Treatment, was published in 1887, and a second edition in 1894. It is now out of date and withdrawn from circulation. Instead of attempting to revise this work it appeared desirable to write a new book upon the same subject, but upon different lines. The course of Lane Lectures on Diseases of the Rectum, delivered at San Francisco in 1902, and the Erasmus Wilson Lectures on Adenoma and Adeno-carcinoma of the Rectum, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons, England, in 1903, suggested to the Author that a work founded mainly upon these lectures might possibly prove to be more acceptable than an attempt to produce a bulky monograph on the subject. In order to carry out this idea, and at the same time to keep the work as concise as possible, it has been necessary to omit historical accounts of the evolution of modern treatment and the description of operations now obsolete, to avoid repetition of notes of cases of a similar kind; not to encumber it with a mass of more or less useless statistics, and while endeavouring to give full credit to others whose work is made use of, not to overweight the book with authorities. An endeavour has been made to make the illustrations a feature of the work. Except a few which are purely diagrammatic, they are all taken from actual cases or specimens; the plan largely adopted in obtaining those of clinical cases, the stages of operations, &c., was to have stereoscopic photographs taken, and from these half-tone drawings were made. 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.