Thomas Beddoes to Erasmus Darwin, May, June or July 1796
I have offered to give an analysis of your work to Johnson; but he has not accepted my offer, and I rather believe that he will employ some other hand. I am sorry for this, as I could have set forth the characteristic excellencies of your work, at least as well as they are likely to be set forth by a hack reviewer. Possibly, these gentlemen may not perceive the merit and the value of such an analysis of morbid phenomena as you have given; to which there is certainly, nothing similar in medical literature. As you have done so much, have you not given us a right to expect the only thing that seems to me wanting to the perfection of your system in a practical view? And this is, an account of such conjunctions of symptoms, as require a particularly nice treatment. For instance, I was informed by a medical student, that a typhus accompanied with severe inflammation of the lungs and pleura, proved fatal to every single patient in the Edinburgh Infirmary, two or three winters ago; and they were not a few. Have you not observed unusual concurrences of morbid phenomena, and ought they not to be described like other monsters?
Published: Stock, p. 131