The touchstone of medical reform : in three letters, addressed to Sir Robert Harry Inglis, bart., M.P. / by Joseph Henry Green.

Date:
1841
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The touchstone of medical reform : in three letters, addressed to Sir Robert Harry Inglis, bart., M.P. / by Joseph Henry Green. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    fessioiis, the Legal, the Theological, and the Medical; —so, on the other hand, it becomes evident that the root of a profession, as distinguished from a mecha- nical art or trade, is science. Disjoined from, or undervaluing and neglecting, the patient and persevering details of observation, the search for facts, and the wakeful attention to them when presented, the healing art would soon fall back to the state in which during a portion of the middle ages it actually existed, when medicine was little better than a fantastic branch of logic. On the other hand, wholly separated from all specu- lative science, from all reference to law and ultimate principles, it would necessarily become a mere collec- tion of cases, of facts without any copula that might render them severally or collectively intelligible,— nay more, without any security or warrant that the supposed facts are actually such, or that the most important incidents may not have escaped the notice of the observer, while non-essential or merely acci- dental circumstances have taken their place. The compendia of medicine would amount to an ever- enlarging recipe book, a collection of recipes with asserted cures; no small part of the credibility of which must rely on the old, often-detected, but always powerful sophism. Cum hoc, ergo propter hoc; —the man was ill;—he took this or that medicine, he got well again, and therefore this medicine cured him ! Those who have amused themselves with the history of new medicines in each successive age or