The progress of pathological science : John Baptist Morgagni and his successors : an inaugural address, delivered as President to the Pathological and Clinical Society of Glasgow / [by Prof. Gairdner].

  • William Tennant Gairdner
Date:
[1887?]
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The progress of pathological science : John Baptist Morgagni and his successors : an inaugural address, delivered as President to the Pathological and Clinical Society of Glasgow / [by Prof. Gairdner]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    THEORY AND PRACTICE. ] 5 evidence, and so comprehensive that it was impossible to get beyond the sweep of their drag-net, occupied all the schools, and gave the tone to the teaching from every professor’s chair. “ Under which king, Bezonian ?” was the question addressed to every pupil and almost to every practitioner, who was almost compelled to lie a humoralist, or a solidist, or a vitalist, without exactly knowing why he was so. And the practice was like the pathology; it was either modelled slavishly on custom and tradition, or it broke violently loose from these upon the basis of some outrageous dogma, which did not even assert for itself a birth out of carefully- studied evidence, but only out of the dust of the arena, the fierce polemics of contending factions. It was scarcely a very violent caricature of the practice of his day, when Boileau compressed its results as regards the patient into one stinging line— “ L’nn meurt vuide de sang, l’autre plein de sene,” or even when Moliere, out of his unbounded contempt for the whole apparent resources of the art, represents the whole chorus of the Faculty as loudly approving the barbarous statement of them by Argan—- “ Clysterium donare, Postea seignare, Ensuita purgare, Repurgare, reseignare, et reclysterizare.” I do not mean to assert that Morgagni himself entirely escaped the influence of these debased traditions of art,
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