Parts of the Body

Again, you may have a special reason for wishing to learn all you can about some one part of the body: the eye, the ear, or the heart. There are fifty articles, in the list below, each dealing with some one organ or part of the body. The illustrations in these articles will help you to understand the exact position of any trouble which you have read about in the article on a disease affecting that particular part. Another set of articles divides the body into groups of organs, one dealing with the Nervous System, another with the Muscular System, another with the Respiratory System, and so on. Then you have the five general articles: Anatomy, Physiology, Pathology, Therapeutics and Surgery, which outline all medical science. The article Medicine gives a complete history of medical science, and its section on Modern Progress reviews all that has been accomplished within recent years.

More Advanced Study

Beginning with the six articles just mentioned, and then taking the more detailed articles in the groups into which their subjects divide them, it is quite possible to follow in the Britannica a complete course of reading on medicine and surgery, and you may desire to do that, just as someone else likes to read about geology or astronomy. But do not forget that no amount of reading can give you more than a theoretical knowledge. When your doctor discovers what is the nature of your illness (which is much the most difficult part of his work), and when he gives you the treatment you need, his eye is comparing what it sees in your case, and his hand is comparing what it touches in your case, with the thousands of observations that he has made in the wards and in the operating theatre of the hospital. Without going through the course that he has gone through in the dissecting room, and studying the living body as he has studied it, you can never know what he knows. But you will be a more understanding patient, and a better nurse, if occasion brings nursing for you to do, if you have learned something of medical science from the Britannica.

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ARTICLES IN THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA RELATING TO MEDICAL SCIENCE

CHAPTER L
GEOGRAPHY AND EXPLORATION

A Library of Geography

The Britannica devotes nearly one fourth of all its space to geographical subjects. You may miss the full significance of this statement; therefore let us put it differently. The matter in the Britannica on geography is equivalent to more than 100 ordinary volumes each containing 100,000 words, which, put on shelves about 5 feet long, would fill a section in your library 5 shelves high. But by the use of new India paper, this same material on geography, combined with three times as much on other subjects of importance, occupies in the Britannica less than 3 feet of shelf space. The unity of plan and treatment and the high authority of the Britannica in these articles are far beyond comparison with that you could get in the most wisely and carefully selected hundred volumes on Geography that would give an equivalent number of words.

A Science as well as a Body of Facts