Medical essays, 1842-1882.

Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical essays, 1842-1882. 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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    governors, representatives, attorneys, and esquires. Then came the published cases of the surgeons of Copenhagen. Then followed reports of about one hun- di-ed and fifty cases published in England, “ demon- strating the efficacy of the metallic practice in a va- riety of complaints both upon the human body and on horses, etc.” But the progress of facts in Great Brit- ain did not stop here. Let those who rely upon the numbers of their testimonials, as being alone sufficient to prove the soundness and stability of a medical nov- elty, digest the following from the report of the Per- kinistic Connnittee. “ The cases published [in Great Britain] amoimted, in March last, the date of Mr. Per- kins’s last publication, to about five thousand. Sup- posing that not more than one cure in three hundred which the Tractors have performed has been published, and the proportion is probably much greater, it wiU be seen that the numbei*, to March last, will have ex- ceeded one million five hundred thousand ! Next in order after the appeal to what were called yhcfc, came a series of arguments, which have been so long bruised and battered round in the cause of eveiy doctrine or pretension, new, monstrous, or deliriously impossible, that each of them is as odiously famibai to the scientific scholar as the faces of so many old acquaintances, among the less reputable classes, to the officers of police. No doubt many of my hearers will recognize, in the following passages, arguments they may have heard brought forward with triumphant confidence in behalf of some doctrine not yet extinct. No doubt some may have honestly thought they proved something; may have used them with the purpose of convincing their friends, or of silencing the opponents of their favorite
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