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I believe it will not be disputed that there was considerable need for an English treatise dealing rather fully with the subject of Neuralgia, and therefore I hope that the profession will be willing to give me a hearing. The present work, moreover, does not profess to be a mere compilation of standard authorities corrected down to the present time, but puts forward a substantially new view of the subject—at least, a view that has been only briefly sketched by me in an article that appeared, three years ago, in Reynolds's "System of Medicine." My principal object, in writing this volume, was to vindicate for Neuralgia that distinct and independent position which I have long been convinced it really holds, and to prove that it is not a mere offshoot of the Gouty or Rheumatic diatheses, still less a mere chance symptom of a score of different and incongruous diseases. In order to set the diagnosis of true Neuralgia from its counterfeits in the clearest light, it seemed advisable to draw separate pictures of each of the latter (at least of as many as are of real importance) and present them separately, as a kind of gallery of spurious neuralgias, and this I have done in the second part of the volume. No one who had not tried to do it would imagine how difficult this latter kind of work is. It was necessary for the sketches to be very brief (unless my book was to become unmanageably large), and yet to be as truthfully characteristic as possible; and it was necessary also that only those diseases which so much resemble Neuralgia as practically to lead medical men astray in diagnosis, should be dealt with. The selection of the subjects, and the execution of this part, took a long time, though it only covers about fifty pages. Then, as regards Neuralgia itself, it became necessary to completely recast the chapters on "Pathology" and on "Complications," on account of some of the polite criticisms which Dr. Eulenburg directed (in his recent "Lehrbuch der Nervenkrankheiten") to my argument in the article above referred to, since it was obvious that a too brief statement of my views had caused them to be partially misunderstood by the German physician. These chapters (Part I., Chapters II. and III.) are certainly the most important portion of my book, and I would particularly direct attention to them, in order that their contents may be affirmed or corrected: the reader will at any time find that they contain a kind of investigation never before systematically carried out with regard to Neuralgia. The causes above mentioned, together with others over which I had no control, have kept back the appearance of this work so long beyond the date for which it was originally announced, that I feel I ought to apologize for an amount of delay that would seem hardly justified by the moderate size of the volume.

16 Wimpole Street, London, October 1, 1871.