Shakspere and the medical sciences : the presidential address delivered on October 12th, 1887, at the opening of the fourteenth session of the Bristol Medico-Chirurgical Society / by L.M. Griffiths.

  • Griffiths, L. M. (Lemuel Matthews)
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Shakspere and the medical sciences : the presidential address delivered on October 12th, 1887, at the opening of the fourteenth session of the Bristol Medico-Chirurgical Society / by L.M. Griffiths. 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.

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    petent experts should be entrusted with the task of comparing and summarising hospital-results, which have been carefully prepared by trained observers. An attempt in this direction was made in the plan introduced some years ago, and known as Collective Investigation. But there the great error was made of appealing indi- vidually to men too limited in their experience of particular diseases; and the fallacy of such a mode was mercilessly, but opportunely, exposed by an anony- mous writer in our own Journal some years ago; * and, fortunately for the medical scientific reputation of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but little is now heard of that ill-begotten scheme. It was only by an accumulated observation of facts that such fixed articles as we have in our medical creed have got into their definite form. There is, therefore, a peculiar fitness in going, for the subject of an address, to a writer who has given us a truer picture of the time in which he lived than any one else has been able to present, and this by holding the mirror up to Nature and then noting in expressive language the facts which he observed. It has been claimed for Shakspere that in some branches of medical science he showed a knowledge far in advance of members of the profession. On the other hand, it has been asserted that he knew no more than any old woman of the period could have told him. It was my purpose to collect the passages referring, directly or indirectly, to medical science or practice, and thus try to find where the truth lies between these conflicting statements; for a third hypothesis—that he may, for the medical allusions, have consulted some practitioner of the healing art—can be dismissed at once, as the references * Bristol Mcdico-Chmtrgical Journal, Vol. II., pp. 196-9. 1884.