Surgical Anatomy

That department of anatomical research to which the name topographical strictly applies, as confining itself to the mere account of the form and relative location of the several organs comprising the animal body, is almost wholly isolated from the main questions of physiological and transcendental interest, and cannot, therefore, be supposed to speak in those comprehensive views which anatomy, taken in its widest signification as a science, necessarily includes.

While the anatomist contents himself with describing the form and position of organs as they appear exposed, layer after layer, by his dissecting instruments, he does not pretend to soar any higher in the region of science than the humble level of other mechanical arts, which merely appreciate the fitting arrangement of things relative to one another, and combinative to the whole design of the form or machine of whatever species this may be, whether organic or inorganic. The descriptive anatomist of the human body aims at no higher walk in science than this, and hence his nomenclature is, as it is, a barbarous jargon of words, barren of all truthful signification, inconsonant with nature..