Medicine and psychology : the annual address to the Hunterian Society, for 1866 / by Dennis de Berdt Hovell.

  • Hovell, Dennis De Berdt.
Date:
1866
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medicine and psychology : the annual address to the Hunterian Society, for 1866 / by Dennis de Berdt Hovell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    pathology has appeared to discover a state of things too hopeless to be remedied, or so much disappoint- ment has followed the attempt that discouragement has ensued; certain it is that, instead of a natural coalition between diagnosis and treatment, there has been an old feud—even now not quite extinct— between the so-called theoretical and practical man ; each more inclined to descant on the errors and depreciate the merits of the other—the practical man, however, coming in for the larger share of disparagement—than mutually to coalesce for the advancement of the main object. But when not only pages, but volumes are written on the description of diseases, their structural changes, their minute pathological investigations, and treatment is dis- missed in a few indefinite lines; when having arrived at a perfect definition, there all efforts stop short, not only confessedly at a loss what to do, but compla- cently satisfied to leave the matter in the immature state of perfect description and unattempted remedy, —we are spontaneously reminded of what was humor- ously said of a then prevailing fashion, that formerly the buckle was a contrivance to keep on the shoe, but now the shoe was of no earthly use but to keep on the buckle; and when the Physician, not having