Discourse on the importance of the study of physiology as a branch of popular education / [John Fletcher].

  • John Fletcher
Date:
1836
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Discourse on the importance of the study of physiology as a branch of popular education / [John Fletcher]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    experience in lecturing on this subject, and in deliver¬ ing courses of more than ten or twelve times the dura¬ tion proposed at present, I have never yet found it ne¬ cessary, in a single instance, to expose a suffering animal even to students of medicine (who are necessarily, in some degree, familiarized with sights of horror), for the purpose of elucidating any point of Physiology, and I certainly shall not begin now; nor can I refrain from stating my belief that experiments on living animals are much less necessary even to the advancement of this science, than has been sometimes imagined. I am per¬ fectly aware how much this plan of interrogating Nature has done, in modern times, for every branch of physical science; but I am equally persuaded that these advan¬ tages have been in general overrated—at any rate that students, in this respect, generally begin at the wrong end, and are often engaged in experimenting on ani¬ mals, in hopes of finding out some one thing or other, on which to found some new and surprising doctrine, while they take no manner of notice of the great num¬ ber of things continually going on in their own bodies, of the rationale of which they are as ignorant as the c]jild unborn. It was a precept which I learned from my first teacher in medicine, the late venerable Abernethy, constantly to remember that I carried always about with me the best subject for observation and experiment—one the most easily to be consulted, since it was quite in my power, and one the phenomena of which should be the most interesting to me, since it was with similar beings alone that I should in future have any immediate con¬ cern ; and this precept I have never lost sight of. We ought never to forget that the best subject for analysis is ourselves, and the most useful contemplation that which relates to the most common processes; and that, till we understand all which can be readily understood, with a little reflection, about ourselves, and know the rationalia of all familiar phenomena, it is preposterous to pore over the warm and quivering limbs of other animals, in search of things recondite and comparatively useless. And with respect to the alleged indelicate and repul-
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