On scientific medicine, and its relations to, and claims upon, society at large : being an address read before ... the North of England Medical Association ... 1840 / by William Elliot.
- Date:
- 1840
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: On scientific medicine, and its relations to, and claims upon, society at large : being an address read before ... the North of England Medical Association ... 1840 / by William Elliot. 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.
19/48 (page 15)
![the best lessons of the best masters ; by native talent she is, generally, wholly uncharacterized ; and as for any elevated moral faculty, incompatible with empty pretensions, and with conscious im- posture, to quackery we look in vain. Wholly ignorant of anatomy, she cannot sug- gest, improve, nor practice any, even the sim- plest operation, nor the simplest medical diagnosis, based upon its ktSozoledge. Such sug- gestions and improvements are, it is true, often long in occurring to the minds of even the scien- tific cultivators of medicine, but to the minds of these alone they do occur. And in some instances, it is curious to observe how (perhaps) a tolerably obvious principle may be introduced into general and successful practice by one indi- vidual, who applies it to a given species of cases, —while it devolves on other individuals, in suc- cession, to extend its application, with equal eclat and success, to other, yet analogous, cases, not attempted by the originator of the practice. For example, a few years back Stromeyer, of Hanover, publicly established, openly communicated, and minutely described—[for true science disdains to keep an improvement secret]—the tran- scendent success of a peculiar method of di- viding the tendon of one or more muscles of the foot, in case of distortion. But it was left to others to apply the same principle in the cure of other distortions, such as wry-neck, lateral cur- vature of the spine, and squinting. “So true is it,” as remarked by the learned historian of the in- ductive sciences, “ that a certain succession of time and of persons is generally necessary to familiarise men with one thought, before they](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21952383_0021.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
