An outline of the history of art in its relation to medical science : being the substance of an introductory address delivered at the Medical and Physical Society of St. Thomas's Hospital, October, 1885 / by William Anderson.

  • Anderson, William, 1842-1900.
Date:
[1887?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An outline of the history of art in its relation to medical science : being the substance of an introductory address delivered at the Medical and Physical Society of St. Thomas's Hospital, October, 1885 / by William Anderson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    1/56
    Reprinted from Vol. XV of ' St. Thomas's Hospital Beports.'] AN OUTLINE OF THE HISTORY OF AET IN ITS RELATION TO MEDICAL SCIENCE.^ Being the substance of an Introductory Address delivered at the Medical and Physical Society of St. Thomas's Hospital, October, 1885. Bt WILLIAM ANDERSON. Medicine and Art^ historically considered, have had littJe in common except their remote antiquity; for while Art in the early essays to attain its ideal was making some of its noblest record? Medicine lagged behind century after century, wasting the pi'ecious years over idle superstitions or in gnawing the dry bones of ancient dogmas; and it was not until the sculptor, the architect, and the painter had done their best that the physician began his advance along the true path of science. It is only upon a scale almost as liberally consti- tuted as the periods of geology that we could venture to com- pute the lapse of time since our forefathers portrayed the great bear, the mammoth, and the reindeer in the caves of southern France, and made their first endeavours to recognise, avert, ' Neither botany nor comparative anatomy has been included amongst the branches of medical science considered in this sketch, each of these subjects having a special history and literature of its own, for the most part distinct from the history and literature of medicine.