Transcriber's Note In this plain text version of A Dissertation on the Inutility of the Amputation of Limbs: Words in italics are marked with _underscores_. Small capital letters are shown in upper case. Original spellings, punctuation, inconsistencies and apparent printers' errors are retained (see note at end of book for exceptions). Footnotes have been moved to the end of sections. A DISSERTATION ON THE INUTILITY OF THE Amputation of Limbs. Written in Latin, by M. BILGUER, Surgeon General to the Armies of the King of PRUSSIA. Augmented with the Notes of Mr. TISSOT, Physician at LUSANNE. Now first Translated into ENGLISH, By a SURGEON. LONDON: Printed for R. BALDWIN, at the Rose, in Paternoster-Row, and T. BECKET and P. A. DE HONDT, in the Strand. MDCCLXIV. ADVERTISEMENT, By the ENGLISH Translator. It is with particular pleasure I present the English reader with a translation of Mr. Bilguer's celebrated performance: It will meet, I doubt not, with the approbation of those, who have the true honour of surgery at heart, and are at the same time friends to humanity. After what is said by so eminent a judge as Dr. Tissot, as well as many others who are an ornament to the profession, I shall not launch out into any eulogium on the author: there is a spirit of modesty, candour and ingenuity runs through the whole, that to every sensible reader will prove a sufficient recommendation of the work.----If it in the least contributes to check the cruel and precipitate practice of taking off limbs that might be saved, thereby preserving the lives, as well as preventing the mutilation of numbers of our fellow creatures, I shall think myself amply recompenced for the labour I have taken in thus endeavouring to render Mr. Bilguer's beneficent design more extensively known. _Speedily will be published_, A Translation of Dr. TISSOT'S last Work, ENTITLED, Avis au Peuple sur sa Santé. By JAMES KIRKPATRICK, M. D. TO DR. PRINGLE, Physician in Ordinary to Her Majesty, Fellow of the Royal Society, &c. SIR,