Opera Occulta

Abstract

With a mixture of pride and humility I began to turn the pages of the great leather-backed volumes which enclose the early Dissertations of the Royal Medical Society. It was something to be done with care, for the pages are brittle and cachetic. The regular, flowing, almost copper-plate writing is only s lightly faded and is eminently legible. We, who can achieve immaculate script only through the medium of machinery, might pause and consider the scholarship of our predecessors who wrote Greek, Latin or English with artists’ hands.