General indications which relate to the laws of organic life / by Daniel Pring.
- Pring, Daniel, 1789-1859.
- Date:
- 1819
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: General indications which relate to the laws of organic life / by Daniel Pring. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by University of Bristol Library. The original may be consulted at University of Bristol Library.
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![pursuing the clews here suggested, to a considerable extent, when the investigation is employed exchisively upon one object. We know nothing of the efficient causation ot diseases: we reason upon this causation on grounds of analogy; but the causes concerned can never be specified, because they are not objects cognizable to the senses. We aspire occasionally to the removal of remote causes, as when we take blood from a vein, or remove a stone from the bladder, but in these cases, the latter of which is the least equivocal, we are ignorant of the efficient or real cause: a stone in the bladder, it may be said, is the cause of irritation; remove this stone, and the cause is removed, and the irritation ceases; very true: the cause is re- moved with the stone, but what is the cause] The etfect of the stone is to produce a certain state, which we call one of irritation of animal properties; these properties can be modified only by an union or combination of other properties: it would be absurd to say that a stone combined with life, and modified its identity. The efficient cause must be looked for in the prt>perfies of the stone, which are related with life; what these properties are we cannot define, because they, like the properties with which t hey are related, are not cognizable to the senses. Indeed, in this ca^e the distinction remains to be drawn and the grounds of it state<l, whether the rela- tion of the properties of the stone is direct or mediate; whether by latent properties common to matter related with life (such as are indicated by food, or nutritious substances), to be classed neither as chymical nor mechanical; or whether by simple gravity modified in Its agency by shape and asj>erities, and related with the spirit by means only of a primitive relation with the mechanical structures, with which the spirit is in alliance. It suffices, however, in these cases, without looking for true or efficient causes, that we are enabled to remove these causes by our knowledge of their alliance with sensible substances. § 28. The sum of our experience (or, perhaps more correctly, of our information, for it is mostly inferential), is, 1st, That some remedies will cure some diseases, and that others will not. 2nd, That the employment of remedies is founded upon analogy; that is, such diseases have been cured by such remedies, and, in agreement with the analogy, we employ the same remedies when we meet with the same diseases. The practice of medicine upon this principle has been called empirical. The difference be- tween empirical practice and that which is distinguished as scientific is, that the analogy in the first is general, and in the latter it is par- ticular. The empiric founds his practice on a partial observance of the analogy of symptoms, and on the general results of remedies; the man of science do,es not en)pIoy remedies simply because they have been found to cure, but he employs them witli a view to a par- ticular mode of operation. The empiric would give a purgative where disease was accompanied by long-accustomed torpor of the bowels: the man of science would perhaps give a purgative in the same case^](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21445163_0338.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
