The autobiography of Elizabeth Squirrell of Shottisham, and selections from her writings : together with an examination and defence of her statements relative to her sufferings, blindness, deafness, entire abstinence from food and drink during twenty-five weeks, and other extraordinary phenomena: also facts and opinions illustrative and suggestive / by one of her watchers.

  • Squirrell, Elizabeth, 1838-
Date:
1853
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The autobiography of Elizabeth Squirrell of Shottisham, and selections from her writings : together with an examination and defence of her statements relative to her sufferings, blindness, deafness, entire abstinence from food and drink during twenty-five weeks, and other extraordinary phenomena: also facts and opinions illustrative and suggestive / by one of her watchers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    66/316 (page 54)
    A. ‘ I agree with you: and your quotation is per- tinent and striking, and reminds me of what I lately read in the “Medical Gazette” of December 12th, 1851. The writer says : “We are Imng in an age of wonders; guns are fired on the cliffs of Dover by a galvanic current, sent in less than a second, under thirty miles of sea, from the opposite coast of France ; the portrait of a respectable gentleman, including whiskers and eyelashes, is transferred in a second of time to a plate of silver; and the quantity of sugar in the urine of a diabetic patient, is actually measured by a ray of polarised light: any one of these facts would have led to the judicial combustion of the inventor in Smithfield two hundred years ago. The effect at the present time should be, to make us cautious as to what we admit, and what we deny.” ’ B. ‘It is well to be under the influence of sound general principles on such a subject as that we are now upon j and, recently in the course of my reading, I have met with remarks bearing strikingly on the subject. Dr. Mason Good has justly observed, that the great Author of nature is perpetually showing us that, though he operates by general principles, he he is, in every instance, the lord and not the slave of his own laws ”; and it is remarked by a very talented and popular author of the present day, that the reception of novelties must ever be regu- lated very much by the amount of kindred or relative phenomena which the public mind already possesses or acknowledges, to which the new can be assimi- lated , and again, there is a measure of incredulity from our ignorance as well as from our knowledge.” A mere opinion of this case, on one side or the other.