Report of the Hunterian oration, delivered before the members of the Hunterian Society, at the thirty-third anniversary, February 4th, 1852 / by W.J. Little.

  • William John Little
Date:
[1852]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the Hunterian oration, delivered before the members of the Hunterian Society, at the thirty-third anniversary, February 4th, 1852 / by W.J. Little. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    posed us to the not over-flattering criticism of the wits and witlings of every country and every period, from Terence to Moliere, Le Sage, and Dean Swift. Even brave old Michael Cervantes himself has a fling at us. Is it not in Don Quixote that the intendant of the hospital, consulting the chief physi- cian, says, 44 What, sir, shall we do this week ?” 44 What,” demands the doctor, 44 did we do last week ?” 44 We physicked the north ward and bled the south.” 44 Then bleed the north ward and physic the south.” It may be supposed that the very earnestness of the pur- suit, in which the members of our profession are engaged, and the consequent zeal with which doctors have maintained their opinions, independently of the influence fairly attributable to egotism, have indelibly impressed our differences of opinion upon the public mind, and furnished poets and satirists with the opportunity of ridicule at our expense. In truth, we have been selected as the butt of derisive mirth, because the ex- ercise of our art has necessarily been conducted openly, in the presence of the people, ever shrewd enough to detect the weak side of individual conduct, if not of medical practice. Thanks, however, to the agency of education, and to the wonderful dis- coveries by which mind and matter are so rapidly and exten- sively moved in the present day, the turn of other learned pro- fessions, to be similarly tested and weighed in the balance of public opinion, has at length arrived. The screens behind which other professions performed, to a great extent, their share in the multiplex drama of life, have fallen down one after another, and the public have become aware, that not doctors alone disagree, but also theologians, judges, barristers, naturalists, engineers—men mighty, both in conception and achievement, notwithstanding that all these professions have to deal with matters supposed to rest upon unchangeable Leges scripts, or upon the fixed forms of the animal, vege- table, and mineral kingdoms, and the immutable laws of ma- thematics and mechanics. That all these differ as widely as doctors differ, the world is, in fact, beginning to comprehend ; that the very variety of intellects, the incalculable number of different proportions in which the formative elements of mental existence are combined, no two persons being identical in
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