On the relation of practical medicine to philosophical method, and popular opinion : being the Annual Oration delivered before the North London Medical Society, on February 10th, 1858 / by J. Russell Reynolds.

  • John Russell Reynolds
Date:
[1858?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the relation of practical medicine to philosophical method, and popular opinion : being the Annual Oration delivered before the North London Medical Society, on February 10th, 1858 / by J. Russell Reynolds. 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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    not in some respects that of advance, we want serious changes of the following kind. Instead of wasting two or three years in com- pounding pills and draughts, and occasionally seeing practice which he cannot understand, the student, before he enters upon his curri- culum of college or hospital work, should he well grounded in physics, chemistry, and botany, and not he bothered (as he often is during this period even), with the “ bones.” He should bestow comparatively much less of his time upon anatomy, and much more upon physiology. Psychology in its non-controversial points should form an integral part of his education. Lecturers on medicine and surgery should not waste their time on pathological anatomy; but leave that to its proper teacher, and thus gain more time for instruc- tion in symptoms and vital characteristics of disease. The spirit of investigation should he evoked rather than details crammed down, and the action of medicines should be made a special object of clinical study. By such means we should gain the advantages derivable from the prevalent philosophical system of the day, and should at the same time avoid its injurious results. Practical medicine would then ad- vance, instead of becoming, as it now appears in danger of becoming, a cumbrous mass of unwieldy diagnostic and prognostic machinery, with the daily increasing conviction that therapeutically considered it is of little use. A vast responsibility attaches to us in the performance of our duty; life and death, happiness or sorrow, are committed to our care. Some of us are not too old to recollect our feelings when the lirst patient entrusted entirely to our care died in spite of all our efforts. We may remember the suggestions of our own minds that this thing was left undone, and that the other might have been better left undone. We may remember writing the death certifi- cate with a trembling hand, doubtful both of our diagnosis and our treatment. But some of us are not too young to know how lightly we regard these matters now; and although this may in part be duo to enlarged experience and acquaintance with the limits of human power to arrest or avert the progress of disease, let us see well to it that this ease does not come from a false system of practical philoso- phy, from a pride or self-sufficiency that Avould assign the limits of scientific art just precisely where our own information reaches, and from an unworthy throwing off of personal responsibility on to the broad shoulders of science or irresponsible laws. In relation to popular opinion and respect, the medical profes- sion undergoes great vicissitudes of fortune; but in spite of all its reverses, it manages to live on, and to appear as well fed, and m as decent apparel, year after year, as if really fortune had nothing whatever to do with its comfort and respectability. There are always different parties in the community, and by one
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