The touchstone of medical reform : in three letters, addressed to Sir Robert Harry Inglis, bart., M.P. / by Joseph Henry Green.

Date:
1841
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The touchstone of medical reform : in three letters, addressed to Sir Robert Harry Inglis, bart., M.P. / by Joseph Henry Green. 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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    cases of the most ordinary occurrence, every man, who has fairly and in good earnest availed himself of the advantages which our medical institutions afford, feels almost as Httle doubt that he is doing what every other regularly educated physician or surgeon would do or prescribe, as the geometrician or arith- metician in the ideal case. It would, as I have already observed, mark the absence of all reflection to expect in any practical profession, or indeed in any applied science, the actual attainment of the advantage, which the purely ab- stract knowledges, arithmetic, pure geometry, and the like possess—namely, that each individual adept in the science should be the adequate representative and substitute of the whole body of its cultivators. And it would be scarcely less irrational to demand or anticipate in a science, the subjects of which are so complex, multitudinous, and fugitive as those presented by the frame and functions of the living- organic body, any such approach to this ideal per- fection as we see actually attained in astronomy. For it is scarcely necessary to remark, that this so close approximation to the excellence of abstract science has been attained under the condition of reducing external bodies, selected as the subjects of this science, to the nature of abstracts, by contemplating them exclusively in relation to mass, motion, weight, distance — in short, to those common properties of matter and mass that are strictly susceptible of num- ber and mensuration. Nevertheless, most needful it