Queries in medical ethics / [William Fraser].

  • Fraser, William, -1888.
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Queries in medical ethics / [William Fraser]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ferent complexion from those that you paint: these rend the very heart-strings, and make us deplore the weakness and impuissance of our art. When these have occurred, I have been on the point of abjuring the practice of physic, have wished to inhabit a den in the desert, or have lamented that I had not been bred to the trade of a cobbler.” Dr. Lettsom, who to an equally benevolent heart joined the most masculine good sense and practi¬ cal wisdom, takes quite another view of the subject, and shews how the honey of comfort may be extracted from the bitter cup of affliction, and the unavailing physician of the body may become the angel of hope and consolation to the mind of the mourners. 44 I did not expect,” he says, in reply, 44 I should ever have occasion to differ in sentiment from Dr. Cuming ; but with respect to all those dreadful pictures he has so painfully ex¬ hibited of the impuissance of our art, I feel (I mean I have experienced,) very different impres¬ sions. A physician is always supposed to have formed a judicious prognostic, to have foreseen the 4 convulsive pangs of an expiring husband and father,’ and all the subsequent catalogue of dis¬ tresses ; but here, my friend, it is, that, when in the physician the friend and the divine are com¬ bined, his affection, his good sense, and his sym¬ pathy, pours into the afflicted the oil of comfort;
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