Medical ethics, or, a code of institutes and precepts, adapted to the professional conduct of physicians and surgeons ... to which is added an appendix, containing a discourse on hospital duties / by Thomas Percival.

  • Thomas Percival
Date:
1803
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical ethics, or, a code of institutes and precepts, adapted to the professional conduct of physicians and surgeons ... to which is added an appendix, containing a discourse on hospital duties / by Thomas Percival. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

    76/268 page 58
    u perhaps cost him above thirty or forty pounds, Though he should sel] them, therefore, for three or four hundred, or a thousand per cent. profit, this may frequently be no more k( than the reasonable wages of his labour charged, in the only way in which he can charge them, upon the price of his drugs.* The statement here given exceeds the emolu- ments of the generality of apothecaries, in countiy districts. And a physician, who knows the education, skill, and persevering attention, as well as the sacrifice of ease, health, and some- times even of life, which this profession requires, should regard it as a duty notto withdraw, from those who exercise it, any sources of reasonable profit, or the honourable means of advancement in fortune. Two practices prevail in some places injurious to the interest of this branch of the faculty, and which ought to be discouraged. One consists in suffering prescriptions to be sent to the druggist, for the sake of a small saving in expence : The other in receiving an annual stipend, usually degrading m its amount, and in the services it imposes, for being consulted on the slighter indispositions to which all fami- lies * See Smith's Wealth of Nations, book I. chap, x.
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3