Medicine and surgery one inductive science, being an attempt to improve its study and practice, on a plan in closer alliance with inductive philosophy, and offering, as first fruits, the law of inflammation ... the whole being the introduction and first part of a system of surgery / By George Macilwain.

George Macilwain

Date:: 1838

Credit: Medicine and surgery one inductive science, being an attempt to improve its study and practice, on a plan in closer alliance with inductive philosophy, and offering, as first fruits, the law of inflammation ... the whole being the introduction and first part of a system of surgery / By George Macilwain. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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its legitimate pretensions, still the philosophical surgeon is no longer content to know how to remove a disease by separating it from the body. That enlarged cultivation of surgical science, which demonstrates the dependence of all local diseases on the state of the general frame, which in fact has rendered the purest surgical case a medical one also, and which has emphatically and for ever established, not only the connection, but the Unity, of surgery and medicine, has opened new fields to our ambition, and has taught us to aspire at the prevention of diseases which we are as yet unable to cure, and at the cure of those which we have hitherto been accustomed to remove by the knife, by the judicious regulation of the powers of the animal economy. But these objects can be achieved only by the progress of our knowledge ; the consideration, therefore, of the means whereby such progress may be effected becomes, not only a legitimate feature, but a principal object of a surgical discourse. The position of a surgeon at the present day may be thus ilustrated: Having arrived at the discovery that local diseases, and indeed all local processes, depend on certain conditions of the ge- nera] economy, he is eventually led by necessity to consider how he can ascertain its conditions, and how correct those which are disordered. This is in fact emphatically the object of the practice of medicine: but, instead of securing the aid he seeks, from what he may have been led to regard as a science, he finds that he can with no certainty obtain such assistance.. He finds a complicated sort of art, which has scarcely any fixed principles; which can with certainty neither predict any phenomena, nor explain the failure of such prediction. He finds that bleeding, calomel, blistering &c. are employed in one compluint ; bark, steel, and wine in another, opium, digitalis, squills, &c. in a third, and so on; but he finds no well-ascertained laws to which the practice can be referred. Disposed to concede any point, that a physician can have the smallest pretensions to claim, he still finds that, for the most part, the practice of medicine consists of an art, in which certain effects are, in a given number of cases, produced by certain means, on grounds, for the most part, in the highest and best sense, but rational conjectures, and conducted so little in the spirit of an inductive philosophy, that, whether his means produce the effect desired, or wholly fail, he is alike unable to refer either the one or other to any law of nature. He feels, therefore, at once, that, if he is to improve his own science, and this by a knowledge of what

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