Volume 1

The healing art, or, Chapters upon medicine, diseases, remedies, and physicians, historical, biographical and descriptive.

Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The healing art, or, Chapters upon medicine, diseases, remedies, and physicians, historical, biographical and descriptive. 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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    PEEPACE. '•' The Lord hath created medicines out of the earth, says the author of Ecclesiasticus; and he that is wise will not abhor them. Then give place to the physician, for the Lord hath created him : let him not go from thee, for thou hast need of him. There is a time when in their hands there is good success. It is in the spirit indicated by these words that the present volumes have been written; not with the pane- gyrics of a credulous believer in the unlimited efficacy of medicine and the unerring wisdom of medical practitioners] not with the depreciatory criticism of the sceptic who de- nounces the worthlessness of drugs, the mysteries of science, and the ignorant audacity of its professors; bvit with the fairness, I trust, of the moderate-minded observer, who, while not denying the empiricism that belongs to medicine, and the changes' of opinion, the assumptions, and the errors to which medical men, like other men, are subject, is sensible, never- theless, of the immense indebtedness of humanity to their care, and skill, and ever-widening knowledge, and to the assistance lent by Medical Science in our daily warfare against Disease and Death. My object in these volumes has been twofold: (1) to present, in a popular and condensed form, a general view of the progress of Medicine from the days of its infancy as a Healing Art; and (2) to combine with this historical relation brief biographical sketches of the eminent men who have contributed to that progress by their genius and devotion.