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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    cavalry charge that the world ever saw, magni- ficent in its course, however extensively it may constitute the Practice, still it is not the Art of Medicine. In no instance has the advance of pathology, without corresponding improvement in treatment, been more strongly illustrated than in that of fever. Till recently, the practice of one of our first hospitals has been to prescribe ammonia as a matter of course ; without entering upon the ques- tion whether typh. fever be one of the conditions of system in which ammonia is retained in the blood, as a result of that condition in which de- structive metamorphosis is in excess of nutrition, or how far the presenting symptoms be those attributed to the absorption of ammonia, or at least intensified by it, the propriety of such a plan, espe- cially as one of routine, is sufficiently questionable to teach us not to be too loud in denouncing the name of an obnoxious form of empiricism, when some of us may have been unintentionally following a similar absurdity of practice to that which charac- terises that peculiarly impracticable theory which first declared its existence by raising its discordant voice