Medicine in modern times, or, Discourses delivered at a meeting of the British Medical Association at Oxford / by Dr. Stokes [and others] ; with a report on mercury by Hughes Bennett.

Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medicine in modern times, or, Discourses delivered at a meeting of the British Medical Association at Oxford / by Dr. Stokes [and others] ; with a report on mercury by Hughes Bennett. 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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    disease. I would not be understood to say that the physician should neglect the sciences of chemistry and biology, and devote himself to the limited study of .morbid phenomena. If any should desire to do so, the attempt would prove its impossibility. The inter- changeable relations of things are such as to make necessary the most discursive operations of the mind, if it would successfully enquire into that which is most special. I desire only that that which is our proper work should have our entire energies, strengthened and directed by every collateral aid. Whilst the biologist traces downwards the relations of the various forms of living things, and, breaking away, one by one, the barriers of separation between them, at length views them all as springing from a common germ, the student of clinical medicine, work- ing in another direction, seeks opposite results. To him, one form of life absorbs and centralises all other forms. His object is to see the facts of human or- ganisation in their most special relations. The very perfection of his work lies in this. It is not even man in general; it is the individual man upon whom his attention has to concentrate. The stock whence he may have sprung, the circumstances of his birth, the time he may have lived, the diseases he may have undergone, the habits he may have acquired,—are all subjects to be brought into the focus of thought at the bedside, and made to clear up the problem of disease. Medicine is a specialism; but of no narrow kind. We have to dissect nature; which, for practice, is better than to abstract it.-^ Every form of life has to us a * Nov. Org. M Q,