Change of type in disease : the address in medicine, delivered at the thirty-third annual meeting of the British Medical Association, held in Leamington, August 1865 / by William Stokes.

  • Stokes, William.
Date:
1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Change of type in disease : the address in medicine, delivered at the thirty-third annual meeting of the British Medical Association, held in Leamington, August 1865 / by William Stokes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    darkness, and storm of the night, bringing, as they best may, health and counsel and comfort to the suf¬ fering man. If we look at the contributions to medicine by the Irish School for the last half century, we shall find that, with a few exceptions, they consist of works, reports, memoirs on clinical medicine, surgery, and midwifery, or of researches in pathological anatomy, mainly having reference to the diagnosis of disease. As compared with other schools, we have not much to show in the way of discovery in pure anatomy, in animal or vegetable physiology, in microscopic anatomy or pathology, or in organic che¬ mistry ; but what the School has done, or attempted to do, is, on the one hand, to enlarge our knowledge of medicine and surgery by careful clinical study of the characters and history of disease ; and, on the other, guided by a sound eclecticism, which neither rejects nor blindly adopts a newly announced principle or observation, to test it by the light of experience, and find how far we can give it a place among the aids, the practical aids, of the healing art. This character or tendency of the Irish School may be traced to traditional and accidental causes. Among the latter, one may be the existence of so large a number of hospitals in Dublin, which, with a popula¬ tion of about 300,000, has not fewer than twenty-one hospitals, each with its distinct staff, the members of which are appointed for life. In this way, the atten¬ tion of a large number of the young men of the pro¬ fession was, as they became hospital officers, neces¬ sarily turned to clinical study. Medicine, in its great quality as a practical art, advances in many directions ; of which two may be indicated as the most important. One is the discovery of new facts, whether relating ' to physiology, pathology, or therapeutics, each of which, even although its practical bearing be not ap¬ parent, enlarges the boundaries of the field of cer¬ tainty. The second is the application of those new facts, on the one hand, to testing the value of methods