Until Wells's edition, our knowledge of Hall and his practice has had to rely only on a partial, seventeenth-century edition (produced by James Cooke in 1657 and 1679, and re-printed with annotation by Joan Lane as recently as 1996). Cooke's edition significantly misrepresents Hall by abridging his manuscript (Cooke removed Hall's conversations with his patients), by errors of translation, and by combining Hall's work with examples from Cooke's own medical practice. Wells's work is the first complete, accurate, and authoritative edition of Hall's casebook. It especially reveals Hall's compassion for his patients, his feelings of joy when they made a recovery, and his religious faith in relation to his medical skills.
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