Volume 1

Collections from the unpublished medical writings of Caleb Hillier Parry.

  • Caleb Hillier Parry
Date:
1825
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Collections from the unpublished medical writings of Caleb Hillier Parry. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Z knowledge, which has for its object the prolongation of animal life, and the preservation of the bodily and mental powers, should have been left in the race so far behind its sister sciences. A little observation will, however, point out the great cause of this deficiency. The laws which govern the human frame might, doubtless, be experimentally ascertained with nearly as much precision as those of mechanics and chemistry, were it not for the intervention of another part of the compound which we would scru- tinize. ‘This is Mind, nurtured in prejudice and error, and therefore selfish; incommunicative and inaccurate, yet proudly expectant ; at once capricious, irresolute, obstinate, and vindictive; suspicious ; offended by reasoning, and averse to truth, yet credulous, and servilely grateful for being duped ; equally intolerant of present inconvenience, and prone to present gratification. Examples of the difficulties arising from this source, which I have experienced during a professional practice of nearly forty years, crowd so forcibly and in such numbers on my memory, that to enumerate only a small part of them, would be to write the severest satire on the follies and vices of mankind. Besides these great difficulties which occur with regard to the objects, or materials, of our examination, others arise out of the nature of the science itself. Medicine, taken in all its relations, comprehends a very extensive field. It is not sufficient that the physician should understand that which is already known of the empirical practice of his profession,
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