A physician and medical reformer enthused by the scientific and cultural progress of the Enlightenment as it took hold in Britain, Thomas Percival (1740–1804) wrote on many topics, including public health and demography. His influential publication on medical ethics is considered the first modern formulation. In 1807, his son Edward published this four-volume collection of his father's diverse work. Some of the items here had never been published before, including a selection of Percival's private correspondence and a biographical account written by Edward. Volume 2 contains essays on moral and literary subjects, notably a Socratic discourse on truth as well as miscellaneous observations on the influence of habit and association. Also included are a memoir of the philanthropist Thomas Butterworth Bayley and the text of Percival's Medical Ethics (1803), which has been reissued separately in this series along with his Essays Medical and Experimental (revised edition, 1772–3).