Locke and Sydenham / [Anon].

  • John Brown
Date:
[1850]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Locke and Sydenham / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    to render him due honour for originating and acting upon them, we must remember in the midst of what a mass of errors and prejudices, of theories actively mischievous, he was placed, at a time when the mania of hypothesis was at its height, and when the practical part of his art was overrun and stultified by vile and silly nostrums. We must have all this in our mind, or we shall fail in estimating the amount of independent thought, of courage and uprightness, and of all that deserves to be called virtue and magnanimity, which was involved in his thinking and writing and acting as he did. “ The improvement of physic, in my opinion, depends, Is#, Upon collecting as genuine and natural a description or history of diseases as can be procured; and, 2^^, Upon laying down a fixed and com¬ plete method of cure. With regard to the history of diseases, who¬ ever considers the undertaking deliberately will perceive that a few such particulars must be attended to: Is#, All diseases should be de¬ scribed as objects of natural history, with the same exactness as is done by botanists, for there are many diseases that come under the same genus and bear the same name, that being specifically different, require a different treatment. The word carduus, or thistle, is applied to several herbs, and yet a botanist would be inaccurate and imperfect who would content himself with a generic description. Furthermore, when this distribution of distempers into genera has been attempted it has been to fit into some hypothesis, and hence this distribution is made to suit the bent of the author rather than the real nature of the disorder. How much this has obstructed the improvement of physic any man may know. In writing, therefore, such a natural history of diseases, every merely philosophical hypothesis should be set aside, and the manifest and natural phenomena, however minute, should be noted with the utmost exactness. The usefulness of this procedure cannot be easily overrated, as compared with the subtle inquiries and trifling notions of modern writers ; for can there be a shorter, or indeed any other way, of coming at the morbific causes, or of discovering the curative indications, than by a certain perception of the peculiar symp¬ toms ? By these steps and helps it was that the father of physic, the great Hippocrates, came to excel. His theory, 0£ojg/a, being no more than an exact description or view of Nature. He found that Nature alone often terminates diseases, and works a cure with a few simple medi¬ cines, and often enough with no medicines at all. If only one person in every age had accurately described, and consistently cured, but a single disease, and made^known his secret, physic would not be where it now is; but we have long since forsook the ancient method of cure, founded upon the knowledge of conjunct causes, insomuch that the art, as at this day practised, is rather the art of talking about diseases than of curing them. I make this digression in order to assert, that the discovering and assigning of remote causes, which now-a-days so much engrosses the minds and feeds the vanity of curious inquirers, is an impossible attempt, and that only immediate and conjunct causes fall
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