Surgeon to Addenbrooke’s Hospital,
Cambridge; University Lecturer in
Surgery; Member of the Alpine Club
Cambridge: Macmillan & Bowes
1896
PREFACE
The following pages were mostly written with pencil in the railway train when the writer was returning from Alpine holidays. The letters were published in the Cambridge Chronicle as a record of the mountaineering season, and extend over the past five years.
A few serious remarks on the climbing foot, and on accidents, are added separately, and little attempt has been made to retouch these yearly letters. Being “touched for the evil” has been known, according to the court wags, to kill a feeble son of Tom Esmond’s. There being little but evil in the lad’s composition, the royal touch which expelled the evil from the patient was a fatal performance. Fearing it might prove so for my poor tracts, they remain much as they were originally printed. Only of this I feel assured, that similar notes, put into my hands when I began climbing, would have been read by me with avidity.
If one of these papers be found now and then somewhat technical, and to savour of another craft, more useful even than mountaineering, that possible usefulness must be my excuse for these digressions.
The series of pictures to illustrate the chapter on the climbing foot I hope will prove of interest. Mr. Stearn, the photographer, of Bridge Street, Cambridge, has caught the expression in the infant’s foot, which I kept in position with my finger, and the remarkable adaptation of the tiny infant’s foot for climbing and all-four progression is very well shown; also those by Captain Abney of the Swiss guides have come out exceedingly well.