Introductory address, delivered at the opening of the session of the Medical College of Georgia : on the second Monday of November, 1838 / by Joseph A. Eve.
- Eve, Joseph A. (Joseph Adams), 1805-1886
- Date:
- 1838
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Introductory address, delivered at the opening of the session of the Medical College of Georgia : on the second Monday of November, 1838 / by Joseph A. Eve. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)
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![[16] ment of the physical means of diagnosis, in thoracic diseases, can not he regarded otherwise, than as one of the most splen- did triumphs and valuable attainments of this inductive philo- sophy, teaching physicians to seize with avidity every thing connected with the subjects of their investigation, to im- prove every opportunity and try every method, in their power, of acquiring all the discoverable circumstances in every sub- ject. The sense of touch, formerly employed for scarcely any other purpose than to ascertain the pulse and the temperature of the surface, is now much more extensively used, in the explora- tion of disease and examination of patients. Means have been invented, such as the speculum &c. to ex- tend the useful application of vision ; and the other senses have all been brought into the same strict and beneficial requisition. The inductive philosophy is emphatically the philosophy of facts; but whilst it teaches their primary and paramount impor- tance and declares that observation and experiment alone can furnish them, it instructs us that, to render facts., when thus obtained valuable and available to science, they must be brought together, compared and classified for the deduction of principles; which method of deriving general principles from particular facts, generalization, is one of the highest and noblest exercises of the human intellect, and the talent for it most char- acteristic of genius. Bichat possessed this faculty in an emi- nent degree, hence his conclusions are so exact, so beautifully true to nature, that they must ever stand as irrefutable axioms in medical science, and his doctrine of the tissues, deduced from his observations and experiments, is justly regarded as a revela- tion in medicine. But great caution is necessary in the exercise of this talent—for equal evil has resulted from the error of gener alizing, as of particularizing too much—errors into which our profession have too frequently fallen.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21118358_0016.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
