…and this is a 
The Royal Society of London is releasing free pdfs of some of its best-known papers — and we're talking real classics. Check out their timeline which lets you scan for papers in chronological order; the oldest are a pair for 1666-1667 by Robert Boyle and Robert Hook(e), which will horrify modern audiences: they describe experiments in blood transfusions and examinations of the lungs in dogs. I would not have wanted to be a dog in 17th century London, that's for sure.
One that is particularly interesting is this account of a new technique in preventative medicine from 1736: "An Account of Inoculation by Sir Hans Sloane, Bart. Given to Mr. Ranby, to be Published, Anno 1736. Communicated by Thomas Birch, D. D. Secret. R. S." It describes the use of small pox vaccinations, and contains this prescient closer:
He's using "wonderful" in an archaic sense of "strange and astonishing". And isn't it strange that still today we have people fighting vaccination through "dread of other diſtempers being inculcated with it, and other unreaſonable prejudices"?
My favorite paper of the bunch, and the one that ought to be required reading for biologists, is The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme". If you haven't read it yet, you should…maybe right after you finish browsing the collection of olde curiosities on that page.
Humanities & Social Science
Life Science
Comments
Posted by: Glen Davidson
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November 30, 2009 12:42 PM
Since we've hardly evolved at all in that time period, no, it's not really all that strange.
Reason's a rather paltry tool with which to combat fear.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Posted by: Postman | November 30, 2009 12:43 PM
I recently read a biography of Robert Hooke and, puppy torture notwithstanding, it was a great read I'd suggest to anyone. Those early members of the Society were fascinating guys.
Posted by: palaeodave
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November 30, 2009 12:44 PM
That Gould paper actually was required reading in one of the units I did at undergrad.
Posted by: Ultimate Delivery Option
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November 30, 2009 12:48 PM
There is a scene in one of Neil Stephenson's books that is written from the perspective of Hooke's lab assistant, who, if I remember correctly, went to bed later that night to a series of rich nightmares.
Posted by: Malkara | November 30, 2009 12:53 PM
Indeed, first book of the Baroque Cycle.
Posted by: Desert Son, OM
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November 30, 2009 12:55 PM
Love how on the time line the marker they have for 1742 is the opening of the Whitbread brewery.
Very, very cool site. Hooke was, indeed, a fascinating individual. I first encountered an account of some of his experiments a few years ago; had to stop reading about the dogs. I'm grateful for developments in science, medicine, and technology (for humans and other animals alike) that owed to animal experimentation, but it's probably good that I never went into veterinary care.
Hug your pets. Thanks for the site notice, PZ, very cool stuff there.
Still learning,
Robert
Posted by: Carlie | November 30, 2009 1:05 PM
They did this a couple of years ago too - DEFINITELY worth browsing through. Hooke especially is so much fun to read; he's all "WHOA I FOUND GROSS LITTLE WIGGLY STUFF THROUGH THIS MICROSCOPE THING". Well, not quite those words, but pretty close.
Posted by: Flip van Tiel | November 30, 2009 1:09 PM
If you read carefully (putting on your spectacles if necessary), you 'll be able to distinguish between the f and the s, much af they feem fo fimilar. It really is 'distemper' and 'unreasonable' (as well as 'should' and 'stopped'). All the same, a great quote.
Posted by: J. James | November 30, 2009 1:12 PM
Very interesting stuff. This is going to keep me occupied for weeks, PZ.
Posted by: True Bob | November 30, 2009 1:14 PM
They had me at
Posted by: Steven Alleyn | November 30, 2009 1:16 PM
Hey, thanks for this! I'm a History Major at Concordia University in Montreal and we've got a fantastic Enlightenment History Prof here. He'd absolutely love this (if he hasn't heard about it already).
(Hate to admit it, but I'm skipping his class today to work on a paper... I'm just on a five minute break right now.)
Posted by: AndreasB | November 30, 2009 1:22 PM
Gah! Please don't replace a 'ſ' with a 'f', it's still a 's'. This makes me cringe and I don't believe I'm the only one.
Same with people who think they can just drop umlauts. So do you just write encyclopadia when you can't write the æ in encyclopædia? No, didn't thinkgrumblemumble</rant>
Posted by: Jürgen | November 30, 2009 1:23 PM
Is there a usable web page with a normal list of the documents somewhere?
Posted by: Sir Craig | November 30, 2009 1:31 PM
Flip van Tiel @ #8:
What's even more amusing about that funny "f" is it's not an "f" at all, but an "ſ", which was the Latin letter for a long "s" at the time (kind of odd they would use it in "ſhould", but there you go)...but I think PZ et al probably knew that already.
Posted by: Dan | November 30, 2009 1:32 PM
Inoculation in 1736 was with live smallpox germs, and there was good reason to be cautious.
Vaccination, with the much less dangerous cowpox germs, wasn't discovered for another sixty years.
Posted by: Antiochus Epiphanes | November 30, 2009 1:42 PM
Spandrels is required reading for all grad comp and candidacy committees that I sit on. Anything that irritated E. Mayr is OK with me.
Posted by: Steven Mading
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November 30, 2009 1:53 PM
On the "f" for "s" thing: They were probably not typing these in all by hand. They were probably using text-recognition software that was written under the false assumption that it's reading modern-day handwriting.
Making text recognition software that works with older scripts would be an interesting project. But don't blame PZ for the fact that ASCII code doesn't have the correct letter for an ancient letter that no longer exists. It is just as incorrect to render it into "s" as it is to render it into "f".
Posted by: MrAllenU | November 30, 2009 2:03 PM
This will definitely be a fascinating read during the winter break from school!
Thanks a bunch. :P
Posted by: inkadu | November 30, 2009 2:06 PM
Why do we call it "preventative" medicine instead of "preventive"? Are preventating disease or preventing?
When I was in the hospital with heart problems, the only prayers I said were prayers of thanks to the sick bastards who dug up corpses at night in order to find out how the human body actually worked.
Posted by: Peter Ashby | November 30, 2009 2:06 PM
@StevenMading
Um they had printing presses in 18thC London you know. That is a direct scan. If you look carefully at those letters you will see a horizontal member only to the left of the upright rather than all the way through as on an f.
Posted by: Jim A. | November 30, 2009 2:07 PM
ſon a bitch, you guys are picky about your typography. Þe crotchety old guy perſentage is pretty high. My 2¢.
Posted by: Peter Ashby | November 30, 2009 2:11 PM
BTW 'distempers' were a definite class of medical maladies back in the 18thC. The term may seem quaint to us now but they were doing the best they could to classify according to principles in furtherance of understanding. That we understand more is no reason to sneer. Our descendants will doubtless sneer at our naiveté over some of ours (remember when gastric ulcers were due to stress and spicy food?). Some humility is in order.
Posted by: Jim A. | November 30, 2009 2:13 PM
Interestingly enough, the fixed width font that we WRITE the comments in has a left half slash, and the proportional width font that they're posted in is missing it.
Posted by: inkadu | November 30, 2009 2:23 PM
Jim - Ah, the thorn. I swear, I think I took a medieval literature class in the nineties and the most challenging part was editing my papers in WordPerfect to include that blasted letter.
Posted by: JohnnieCanuck
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November 30, 2009 2:28 PM
Those sick bastards were so prevalent in the vicinity of medical schools of the day, that people resorted to all kinds of deterrences to protect the freshly dead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortsafe
Posted by: flabblebabble | November 30, 2009 2:45 PM
Oh yea, I'd totally let a guy who tortures puppies stick a needle in me, too.
Skepticism of medicine is warranted sometimes, you know.
Posted by: Jeffrey | November 30, 2009 2:49 PM
I had to read the Spandrels paper for my evolutionary biology class last year. It's a shame that so few papers reference Voltaire these days.
Posted by: AndreasB | November 30, 2009 2:49 PM
Steven Mading:
Uh, I would strongly dispute that. The long s is a 's'. A form only used in outdated typography, but still. Definitely not a 'f'.
Secondly, ASCII doesn't have äöüßø最 etc. either, still doesn't mean you can substitute other characters willynilly.
Thirdly, ASCII? Where do you come from, the 20th century? ;-þ
Posted by: Ballookey Klugeypop
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November 30, 2009 3:19 PM
I love the fact that I was going to sigh and moan about ſ being mistaken for f, but I see that a bunch of people beat me to it. That's awesome.
Posted by: Brock | November 30, 2009 3:19 PM
Speaking of Oldie Moldies, I got to see a first edition of "On the Origin of Species" the other day on its publishing "birthday". Had a simple green cover (as supposedly they all do) and a nice fold-out tree diagram; otherwise it didn't much stand out. Still, great to see :)
Posted by: Steven Mading
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November 30, 2009 3:30 PM
re AndreasB: "Secondly, ASCII doesn't have äöüßø最 etc. either, still doesn't mean you can substitute other characters willynilly."
Thank you for making my point for me. On my computer many of those letters rendered as a bunch of boxes with dots in the middle of them (the standard icon used for "I can't draw this character because it's not available in this font.")
I deal with this regularly in my job. The problem isn't that there's no other standards beyond ASCII that include more letters. The problem is that there's more than one of them and no guarantee what's going to be configured to work correctly on the target computer unless you're in control of administrating the target computer (which you're not if you're publishing on the web).
And no, it is not correct to render the old letter into "s", since the old letter is more specific, covering a more narrow range of sounds than than the modern "s" does.
Posted by: John Vreeland | November 30, 2009 3:33 PM
I don't know if this has landed in definition country yet, but the uses I have seen imply that inoculation is done with the live virus (cross your fingers) while vaccination is done with something else that is supposed to be safer, like a weakly symptomatic relative of the germ or a killed virus.
Posted by: Steven Mading
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November 30, 2009 3:36 PM
I know it's a direct scan. What would matter is if it was an IMAGE scan rather than a character recognition scan. Your post makes it unclear which you meant. (The word "direct" could describe either case).
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM
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November 30, 2009 3:50 PM
I know what a D.D. is (Doctor of Divinity). I know what the R.S. is (Royal Society). What does "Secret." mean for Dr. Birch?
Posted by: Glen Davidson
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November 30, 2009 3:57 PM
Um, wouldn't "Secret." most likely mean "Secretary"? Of the R.S.?
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Posted by: Glen Davidson
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November 30, 2009 3:59 PM
Found on Google:
"Reverend Thomas Birch, D. D. Secretary to the Royal Society"
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Posted by: Peter Beattie
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November 30, 2009 4:04 PM
You are aware of Jerry Coyne's recent post about the spandrels paper by Gould and Lewontin, including Richard Dawkins's comment?
Posted by: David Estlund | November 30, 2009 4:31 PM
Man, it really is Red Meat Day(TM) at Pharyngula! And me too busy to sojourn into comment country. I'm sure I'll feel obligated to chime in right about the time everyone's left the room.
Posted by: Armand K. | November 30, 2009 4:34 PM
About the "S" problem:
The sign used in the manuscript, "ſ", is correctly transcribed as "s". The convention (i call it "covention", lacking a more specific word) was to use a different grapheme for an ending "s". Some time later, the latter one was adopted for any occurence of the letter, and the former was dropped -- among other reasons, due to its resemblance to an "f", I suppose*.
This convention can be traced back to the medieval manuscripts and, later, to the Blackletter scripts widely used in Western typography. (As a matter of fact, it still is in use in the Fraktur script, the Blackletter version adopted in German-speaking countries, widely used in printing until the 1930-40s. And, also, in its corresponding handwriting, the Sütterlin script.)
For the Roman (or Antiqua, or Latin -- the minute differences aren't relevant in this particular case) fonts like the one in the document in discussion the convention in Blackletter was kept for the "s". In fact, in William Caslon's specimen sheet from 1734**, you can see it consistently used as described by me.
* In the Fraktur and some other Blackletter versions it generates an even greater confusion, as the faces for minuscule (internal) "s", "f" and "k" look very similar, the only differences being in the crossbars.
** I used W. Caslon's specimen because I strongly suspect the piece of document included by Prof. Myers is printed with a Caslon typeface. Initially I thought it might be a Baskerville, very similar in many aspects -- only the Baskerville typefaces are a few decades newer than the document.)
Posted by: Grant | November 30, 2009 4:39 PM
Thanks for the conversation on the f and ſ, mixed up that on my own blog post on this topic covering the van Leeuwenhoeck paper, which is also a great read. Next time I might get this right...!
Posted by: Joel | November 30, 2009 4:46 PM
RE Peter Beattie: here's the link for the paper that Richard Dawkins was talking about, now available free:
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/205/1161/547
Posted by: Jason Febery | November 30, 2009 5:38 PM
Wow. There are some really interesting articles there. I look forward to reading more of them tonight, after work.
--
http://www.jasonfebery.wordpress.com
Posted by: Steven Alleyn | November 30, 2009 6:19 PM
@#39
While the convention may have called for a very specific use of something very similar to an f in case of the letter S, I know from research experience that, whether for reasons of missing type-pieces in the printing presses or mere laziness, many 17th and 18th century documents use identical characters to represent both letters. They are not always merely similar.
Posted by: DaveH_of_Lundun | November 30, 2009 6:39 PM
Why Hook(e)? Did he sometimes spell it without the e?
Posted by: Lee Picton | November 30, 2009 6:56 PM
The Thorn (as I learned in my basic linguistics class) looks like a lower case "y" with a long tail, and has the pronunciation of "th" before a vowel. That is why when you see the pretentious "Ye Olde Shoppe," you are really saying The Old Shop. Thorn is not related to the s vs. f discussion at all.
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM
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November 30, 2009 7:13 PM
Glen Davidson #35 & 36
Thank you, Glen.
Posted by: Armand K. | November 30, 2009 7:19 PM
@Steven Alleyn #43
Yes, I've seen that myself in some documents. I'd add ignorance on the part of the typesetter (coupled with sloppy proofreading) as reason for some (many?) of the errors.
As a side note: Laziness and ignorance still are the main reasons for most print errors of this sort... nowadays, when there's virtually no other excuse for a typesetter.
Posted by: Bardiac | November 30, 2009 8:05 PM
Ahh, a discussion of typography! What could be better?
Posted by: AndreasB | November 30, 2009 8:06 PM
Replace your cheap fonts with proper ones. All characters I listed aren't exactly obscure, they occur in European Latin scripts so any reasonable font covering basic Latin (as in ASCII) should also cover these nowadays. I mean, it's not as obscure as ⑬ or something. "There's so many standards" should be no excuse either, any browser worthy of consideration converts charsets for display as needed. Anyway this blog is in UTF-8 — not exactly an obscure charset.
That wasn't your point by the way. You said 'f' is just as acceptable as 's' as a substitute for 'ſ'. My point was that if you need to replace them, there's proper replacements. A 'long s' is a 's' as history easily shows: Are there any words that used to be written with 'ſ' have 'f' in its place in current spelling?
And while I'm ranting, the proper ASCII substitutes for German ä, ö, ü are ae, oe and ue respectively while a, o, u are wrong (hence my underhanded encyclopædia example I slipped in above). The ß is ss.
Posted by: Steve L | November 30, 2009 9:10 PM
I liked this reply to Spandrels (by Queller):
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3035826
Posted by: windy | November 30, 2009 9:48 PM
Unlefs I mifsed fomething, the "long s" is used in the post? Or did PZ change it?
And while I'm ranting, the proper ASCII substitutes for German ä, ö, ü are ae, oe
But the same does not necessarily go for Fenno-Scandian ä's and ö's.
Posted by: Silič O'Nopolitanopoulos, Färschdbischuf Beesknees aus Ulm und Klein Elguth, Elector Pharynguline.
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November 30, 2009 11:10 PM
I believe the distinction between internal and final ss goes all the way be to Greek: σ vs. ς.
Posted by: stripey_cat | December 1, 2009 4:39 AM
Greek multiple forms of sigma are, as far as I'm aware, a later innovation: the few classical samples I've seen either use a lunate sigma (probably the ancestor of the other lower-case forms that are quicker to write; the closed sigma is helpful if you're writing joined-up cursives) throughout, or are using the (older) capital letter forms because they're easier to scratch or write with a scratchy pen.
Posted by: cedgray.wordpress.com
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December 1, 2009 5:28 AM
Richard Dawkins leaves a comment over at Coyne's site, talking about the presentation of Gould's Spandrels paper:
That paper is here:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/77445
Posted by: csrster | December 1, 2009 7:44 AM
There's also Dennett's critique of the spandrels paper in Darwin's Dangerous Idea. I'd be interested to hear what PZ has to say on the subject. It would make a change from all the bellyaching about religion :-)
Posted by: ivo | December 1, 2009 8:26 AM
Yeah, Dennett's critique of the Spandrel (al well as of Gould's other infamous creature, the Punctuated Equilibrium) is pretty thorough and convincing. I am also curious whether PZ know it / buys it.
Posted by: ivo | December 1, 2009 8:29 AM
... did I just say "thorough and convincing"?
It's more like devastating.
Anyway, thanks for the link.
Posted by: bcoppola | December 1, 2009 9:49 AM
I'm insufficiently science-y to read an entire paper (I'm still hazy on elementary concepts like alleles) but what struck me in the Spandrel abstract was the reference to Darwin's "pluralistic" view of evolution. I'm slowly working my way through Origin* and that's something I noticed - Darwin's ideas were much more subtle and complex than the all-to-common portrayal of evolution by adaptation. Even the professionals have been guilty of oversimplification, it seems.
FWIW, the edition I have is the illustrated "coffee table" one that came out last year or so. It includes a lot of excerpts from his other work as well as correspondence from Huxley et al. For a layperson it all adds to the picture of the man and illuminates his thinking, IMO.
Also, Chuck was a handsome cuss in his youth, and Emma was a babe.
--
*As well as "Moral Minds". After that, I need to read some light fiction!
Posted by: Jim A | December 1, 2009 10:06 AM
Actually, using "y" to replace the glypf for "þ" (thorn) is an analagous mistake to replacing the glypf for the long s with an "f". It LOOKS more like the glypf being replaced, but it confuses the pronounciation, because the LETTERS are different. Thorn is more properly replaced by "th", which is the dypthong it represents.
Posted by: Pedant | December 1, 2009 4:21 PM
Apropos of nothing;
Using a 'y' for a 'þ' was an abominable practice from the early days of movable type, perpetrated by lazy typesetters lacking thorns.
Thorn in modern usage is an unvoiced 'th.' Likewise ð (eth) is a voiced 'th.' In Old English and Norse, they broke the rules all the time, so take your pick.
Posted by: Pedant | December 1, 2009 4:23 PM
IANAL (I am not a linguist) but;
Using a 'y' for a 'þ' was an abominable practice from the early days of movable type, perpetrated by lazy typesetters lacking thorns.
Thorn in modern usage is an unvoiced 'th.' Likewise ð (eth) is a voiced 'th.' In Old English and Norse, they broke the rules all the time, so take your pick.
Posted by: Ichthyic | December 1, 2009 8:05 PM
In the event, Gould totally ignored Clutton-Brock and Harvey, and gave his prepared paper, playing for horse laughs from the gallery, as if nothing had happened. It was the beginning of my disillusionment with Gould, whom I had previously respected.
yes, i understand PZ is no fan of pan-adaptationists, but frankly, there never were any to begin with, regardless of how some of the more hyperbolic evo-psych folks appear to come off these days.
I really do think Gould and Lewontin were erecting strawmen of where the science was actually going at the time, let alone where it is now.
...to suggest to read the spandrel paper, with no context, is a disservice imo., and i'm very glad someone has posted the link to the original Clutton-Brock response.
Gould, to say the least, was hardly always correct in his opinions, but then who of us is.
Posted by: Ichthyic | December 1, 2009 8:09 PM
I am also curious whether PZ know it / buys it.
yes, he's well aware of it.
yes, he "buys" it.
i just think it was an oversight to not include context in recommending reading the spandrel paper.
it will indeed confuse any who read it without knowing the actual background of the people it was intended to critique, nor of the field as a whole at the time.
Posted by: Ichthyic | December 1, 2009 8:12 PM
...last comment on this:
typically, it is recommended that any student of evolution read the spandrel paper, as a cautionary tale against overusing adaptationist hypotheses.
again, though, Gould missed the mark imo wrt to where the field as a whole stood at the time he and Lewontin wrote that paper, and this too should be noted to any student of evolution.
Posted by: Antiochus Epiphanes | December 1, 2009 8:31 PM
The reason that I think the Lewontin and Gould paper is good to read for students is precisely because it is so strident--strawman flailing, sure, but I find that undergraduates excited about evolution have a tendency toward panadaptationalism. Let's face it...selection is so much more interesting then drift. Students (and me too) need to be reminded that selection is a part of evolutionary theory, but not the whole of it. Its important to place selection theories in a scientific context and to remain skeptical of just-so thinking.
Posted by: Ichthyic | December 1, 2009 8:43 PM
indeed, and that was well known during the time Gould and Lewontin wrote that paper, which is why, actually, they received so much criticism!
Posted by: Phiwilli | December 1, 2009 8:55 PM
Another conservative religious option, that I haven't noticed being mentioned here, is that the Bible means what God intended it to mean, not what the scribes and ancient Hebrews understood it to mean. That provides a way to ignore historical evidence.
But even that approach doesn't resolve the numerous inconsistencies . . .
Posted by: Cactus Wren
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December 1, 2009 10:36 PM
Samuel Pepys described one of these experiments in his Diary, in the entry for November 14, 1666: "Here Dr. Croone told me, that, at the meeting at Gresham College to-night, which, it seems, they now have every Wednesday again, there was a pretty experiment of the blood of one dogg let out, till he died, into the body of another on one side, while all his own run out on the other side. The first died upon the place, and the other very well, and likely to do well. This did give occasion to many pretty wishes, as of the blood of a Quaker to be let into an Archbishop, and such like; but, as Dr. Croone says, may, if it takes, be of mighty use to man’s health, for the amending of bad blood by borrowing from a better body."
Posted by: Online OCR | December 2, 2009 7:43 AM
HERE is good intresting artical and i like it...thx
Posted by: Antiochus Epiphanes | December 2, 2009 8:05 AM
@#66...doesn't seem that well known now. Behavioral ecologists are not all guilty of this, but I have seen three BE seminars in the past three months that demonstrated the same myopic concentration on selection that G&L warn about. Its easy to say that everyone knows that selection i one of several evolutionary mechanisms...however, in my experience people in their own research programs often have a tendency to behave as panadaptationalists.
Posted by: Ichthyic | December 2, 2009 3:05 PM
.however, in my experience people in their own research programs often have a tendency to behave as panadaptationalists.
be careful you don't mistake obvious an obvious hypothesis for a specific circumstance for panadaptationilsm.
some things obviously are not examples of drift.
Posted by: EB | December 4, 2009 5:17 PM
Here's what I like about these old papers: they prove concepts that would seem obvious to anyone today.
For example the one where Joule showed that work and heat are two ways of transferring energy (1850). Most people today will tell you that if you stir up water, it will heat up. To them it's obvious. But if you next ask them to read the paper by Joule, they might start to understand that this basic concept took **a lot of work to prove**.
Most creationists and anti-elitists forget: Science is tough!
Posted by: ivo | December 5, 2009 5:49 PM
Ichthyic, thanks for the remarks on the Spandrels paper.
---
I have read the pdf of Newton's optics article, and it is beautiful (except for the long s's, and more generally the trollish mix of typfaces :-). I can recommend it to everybody, not only to physics buffs, as it is almost always clear and even conversational in style (it is after all a letter to the editor). It nicely portrays not only the results of Newton's experiments, but also the way he struggled to make sense of them along the way, as well as the phylosophical musings surrounding them. It is sweet and short: in 14 friendly pages, the guy changes forever how people understood the nature of light and colors; he provides the irrefutable and easily replicable experimental evidence; he applies his theory to solve an list of problems and paradoxes of the old picture; and he applies his ideas to design better telescopes, and actually constructs some himself...
Gotta love this line:
Ah, the heroic days of science! When scientists fled the Plague, and the educated English gentleman could keep up with the current research in all fields of human knowledge by reading a single Journal, which read like a Newspaper's Sunday supplement!
sigh
Posted by: Antigua Travel
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June 21, 2011 4:58 AM
I like this article and the comments. It gets really to the point. I will use it as a reference for my essay. Thanks PZ!
Posted by: https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawk-tZ6dKUdQQbVxwmk-lpaDRbUVBfjZFmk
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December 2, 2011 3:37 PM
The term may seem quaint to us now but they were doing the best they could to classify according to principles in furtherance of understanding. That we understand more is no reason to sneer. Houston Personal Injury Attorney