Crosse, a British surgeon whose name appears without the final "ed" on the title page, was a British surgeon who spent the winter of 1814-15 in Paris, where he wrote numerous letters to friends in london and Dublin describing Parisina hospital practices. These were then collected and published in this book, "the most measured and detailed British account of study in Paris" (Brockliss, “The new Paris medical school and the invention of the clinic,” in Cross and D. Williams, eds., The French Experience from Republic to Monarchy, 1792-1824, 137.)