Pneumonia : its supposed connection, pathological and etiological, with autumnal fevers; including an inquiry into the existence and morbid agency of malaria / by R. La Roche.

  • La Roche, R. (René), 1795-1872.
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Pneumonia : its supposed connection, pathological and etiological, with autumnal fevers; including an inquiry into the existence and morbid agency of malaria / by R. La Roche. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    discovering truths heretofore concealed from the notice of medical investigators from the days of Llippocrates to the present; and who fancy they can explain all professional questions, however complex and apparently foreign to their ordinary pursuits or their opportunities of inquiry, in a more lucid, natural, and satisfactory way than any of their predecessors or contemporaries. Such is the probable explanation in many instances. But the medical world is occasionally startled by the appearance of hypotheses and theories, both crude and untenable, and sometimes of more than problematical originality, by a very different class of men. The hypotheses to which allusion is here made are promulgated with unflinching confidence by individuals to whom, from the distinguished position they have reached in the ranks of the pro- fession, from the respectable character of their intellectual endow- ments, from the extent of their general and medical acquirements, no less than from the high standing of their moral character, we cannot justly attribute selfish considerations, youthful vanity, or the monomania of authorship; and who might have been expected to abstain from the attempt to stem the current of received opinions, and to aspire to the honours awarded to true medical reformers, and correct exponents of new views. In these, the cause must be sought, sometimes in the want of a proper balance between the fancy and the judgment, a defect which leads the individual to mistake ingenious nights of the imagination, odd notions, and whimsicalities, for correct inferences from enlarged and accurate observations. In others, it is to be found in a disposition, not uncommon even among otherwise clever men, to discard received opinions whenever, in their estima- tions, these do not prove satisfactory on all points, however shadoAvy may be the grounds of dissatisfaction, and to fly at once to the most opposite modes of explanation. In a different class, we must seek the explanation in a restless tendency, not unfrequently exhibited by individuals whose minds, though naturally good and well cultivated, have, nevertheless, not been thoroughly trained in the school of severe induction, to jump hastily at conclusions and to draw inferences without having collected, analyzed, and compared a sufficient number of facts, bearing directly or indirectly on the point at issue. Sometimes we find it in a disinclination to examine the subject in all its bear- ings; in a deficiency in the power of appreciating the full force of facts and circumstances militating against the views adopted, or a too