A drug is its own antidote / by William Sharp.

  • Sharp, William, 1805-1896.
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A drug is its own antidote / by William Sharp. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    6/46 (page 6)
    mented wltli—act in contrary ways in different doses; and the prediction is that all other drugs, when experi- mented with, will act in like manner. Here are two law-facts added to the first, and they appeal, as predic- tions, to be verified by further experiments; the grand and indeed only character of truth being its capability of enduring the test of universal experience, and coming unchanged out of every possible form of fair discus- sion. (Herschel.) An essential feature of our study of natural objects is a classification of them, and an essential feature of a class is that all the objects put into it have something in common—one property belonging to each of them— they may differ widely in other properties, but unless they agree in possessing one, which is the same in all, the class is faulty and worthless. Let this requisite be applied to drugs, and let it be seen that nothing is classed as a drug which does not resemble other drugs in having the one property belonging to them; having this, it will be found to possess the others also that are common to them all. The word science is often carelessly used instead of the word knowledge. Tt has been shown in former Essays, that the word should be restricted first to mathematics, and next to a combination of observa- tion, experiment, and. inductive reasoning, spent upon the phenomena of nature until law-facts are discovered, from which fixed and permanent rules of working may be deduced. Natural Science is mathematical or physical. In the future it will be seen that the physician's first duty is to understand that his Profession is a Science. Through past time it has been called Ars Medica, the Medical Art, and it has been universally practised as such. The youth of Medicine has lasted long enough, and the time must have arrived when men will study and practise medicine, not as an Art but as a Science. It is high time for the beggai'ly and often mischievous elements^ on which it is yet founded, to be cast away, and for a foundation to be sought, and sought till it is found, much more satisfactory and stable. Such is a statement of the case in hand mainly in the language of two men of acknowledged great ability