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 Medical Ethics (also reissued in this series) 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 4 contains the third and fourth parts of Percival's Essays Medical and Experimental, which were completed following the revised edition that is reissued separately in one volume in the Cambridge Library Collection. The essays reflect Percival's wide range of interests, such as the regulation of hospitals and prisons, and the medical abnormalities he sometimes observed in his patients.