An introductory lecture addressed to the students of the Westminster Hospital at the commencement of the session 1871-72 : the relation existing between medicine and the other arts and sciences / by W.R. Basham.

  • William Richard Basham
Date:
1871
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An introductory lecture addressed to the students of the Westminster Hospital at the commencement of the session 1871-72 : the relation existing between medicine and the other arts and sciences / by W.R. Basham. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    observer, one trained to habits of cautious observation, approaches almost to a moral certainty. It is this which constitutes the difference between a skilled and unskilled practitioner. The one, by experience, is able to identify circumstances and conditions which arise from, or are generated by, organs in a certain state of disturbance. Long observation and the comparison of post-mortem results with symptoms occurring during life, have enabled him to fix with some certainty the probable result. But it is, after all, but probable ; in extreme cases there may be a moral certainty of the result predicted; it is, however but a deduction drawn from analogy—the comparison of other and supposed similar cases. In therapeutics, or the employment of remedies for the treatment of disease or deranged function, there is a similar want of absolute certainty or demonstrative proof of the results desired. As a rule, purgatives purge, narcotics narcotize, stimu¬ lants stimulate, each individual to whom they may be administered. But how different in degree—how different in their remote effects—how impossible to predict with cer¬ tainty or to measure with scientific] exactitude the result. The dose or quantity which will cause a drastic, drenching purge on one will scarcely operate on another. The narcotic which stupifies one will scarcely induce sleep in another. The stimulant which will make one man drunk will barely excite another, and still wider differences may be observed in the remote effects produced by these and similar re¬ medies. What skilled and trained observation, then, is requisite to guide the practitioner where exactitude and certainty are impossible, and where moral probability is the nearest
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