Fallacies of the faculty, with the principles of the chrono-thermal system of medicine : in a series of lectures originally delivered in 1840, at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly / by S. Dickson.

Samuel Dickson

Date:: 1843

Credit: Fallacies of the faculty, with the principles of the chrono-thermal system of medicine : in a series of lectures originally delivered in 1840, at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly / by S. Dickson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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$education of the people. By surgeons Ana- tomy must be studied minutely, and few men in these days would care to practise Physic without possessing a competent knowledge of the various organs of the body on which me- dicines operate. But let the student keep in mind that a dead body is one thing and a living body another—and that a man may know anatomy as well as the best professor who ever taught it, and yet be utterly ignorant what medicines to prescribe if he wished to alter the motions of any one organ of a living body. To Physic, anatomy is a mere accessory —and the Physicians of some countries, India and China for example, practise their profes- sion with wonderful success, though they never saw the inside of a dead body. Sydenham is called to this day the English Hippocrates, and yet see how little he prized anatomy.—And, certainly, in his own words, it is a know- ledge easily and soon attained, and it may be shortened more than other things that are more difficult, for it may be learned by sight in human bodies, or in some animals, and that very easily, by such as are not sharp-witted,” [mean- ing thereby that any blockhead with a tolerable memory may easily master it.] “ But in acute diseases,” he continues, “ which kind contains more than two-thirds of diseases; and more- over, in most chronic complaints, it must be confessed there is some specific property” [de- pending, as I shall afterwards show you, on the electrical condition of the living brain,] which no contemplation reduced from the spe- culation of the {dea(T\ human body can ever discover :•—wherefore, that men should not so place the main of the business upon the dis- section of carcases, as if thereby the medical art might be rather promoted, than by the diligent observation of the natural 'phenomena, and of such things as do good and hurf”—such as the action of medicine and other external agency upon the living. How different this from the language of Dr Baillie, who says, “ The dead body is that great basis on which we are to build the knowledge that is to guide us in distributing life and health to our fellow-creatures.” Here then, so far as mere authority goes, you have the opinions of two celebrated men in direct opposition. But in the course of these lectures I will give you something better than any human authority, however respectable. The too exclusive spirit in which professors have urged the necessity of investigating the bodies of the dead, not in England only, but throughout Europe, has given rise to a class of medical materialists, who, hoping to find the origin of every disease made manifest by the scalpel, are ever mistaking effects for causes. Loth to believe that death may take place without even a palpable change of structure, these individuals direct their attention to the minutiae of the dead—and finding, in their search, some petty enlargement, some trifling ulceration, or, it may be, some formidable tumour or abscess, hastily set this down as the first cause of a general disease of which it u^s only a development or coincident part. “These people,” in the words of a. late physician. Dr Uwins, “ put consequence for cause, incident for source, change in the condition of blood- vessels for powers producing such change. It j is an error which has its origin in the blood I and filth of the dissecting room, and which tends to degrade medicine from the dignity of ■ a science to the mere detail of an art.” What I has practical medicine gained at the hands of anatomical professors ? The greater number of their pupils have been sceptics in Physic; and no wonder, since they have been so constantly accustomed to hear, ex cathedra, that anatomy is the foundation of all medical science. That were true enough, if by the word “ foundation” was meant that anatomy is the lowest part of it. The fact is, this kind of language is the natural result of a too great preponderance of surgical influence in the schools. It is the effect of a too great influence of your “ great I operators,”—tending to make young men ex- j pert anatomical mechanics, but nothing more. || These leave their universities, not only with a I contempt for Physic, but without a single cor- rect idea of the action of medicine on the living system; and yet to these the people of this country chiefly entrust the treatment of their diseases, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, demand medical, not surgi- cal knowledge. Beware, then, of trusting to great operators, to men whose art Shakspeare truly says has “no honour in it”—for were Physic better cultivated, there would be little$