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NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.
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THE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE OF OBSTETRIC MEDICINE AND SURGERY, in reference to the process of Parturition, with 100 illustrations, on Steel and Wood. By FRANCIS H. RAMSBOTHAM, M. D., Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, &c. Second edition, enlarged. London: John Churchill, 1844.
We do not notice this important work to make its merits known to the profession, or the public, but to point out one of the many evils which we inflict upon ourselves, by denying to foreign authors the right to control their own works. In books of this class, it is of the last importance, not less to the student than to the author, that their publication should he superintended by himself or his agent. If they I are worth having at all, it is important that they should be had correctly. The author states his grievances, arising from our system of republication, very quietly but forcibly, in the preface of the second edition of his work.
“Very soon after the book was published in England, it was also edited, with lithographic drawings, at Philadelphia; and, although it cannot but be a source of gratification to an author, to consider his observations worthy of being dressed in a new garb, and circulated over the Western hemisphere, still, I think I have some reason to complain of the mode in which this has been done, in the present instance. It was put forth without the name of any ostensible American editor, merely with the notification of its being the first American edition, revised, as though I had myself superintended it, and sanctioned its appearance. And the revision consists in the omission of some of my annotations, and all the Appendix, except the article on ‘Suspended Animation,’ which is subjoined to one of the pages; with the introduction, also, of numerous typographical errors, some of them completely changing the sense of the passage, and others so glaring as to tend in uo small degree, to bring the writer into ridicule. I look upon this as a just cause for animadversion; fur if our transatlantic brethren choose to appropriate to themselves our publications, they should, at the least, reprint them as they appear here, and use such ordinary care that the character of the work may not suffer in their hands. 14 New Bond street. Oct. 1844.”
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Notes:
This review was specifically rejected as being by Poe by W. D. Hull.
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[S:0 - BJ, 1845] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Criticism - Literary (Briggs ?, 1845)