Annual address delivered before the New-York State Medical Society and members of the legislature : at the Capitol, February 6, 1850 / by Alexander H. Stevens.

  • Stevens, Alexander H. (Alexander Hodgdon), 1789-1869.
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annual address delivered before the New-York State Medical Society and members of the legislature : at the Capitol, February 6, 1850 / by Alexander H. Stevens. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    rate eulogy on the science we cultivate and the art we practise. Let it suffice that our profession is concerned for man at his birth, and even before his birth ; it follows him through infancy and childhood, through manhood and old age ; aiming to protect him from disease, to increase his strength, assuage his pains, and dimin- ish his infirmities; and to administer comfort and relief under all exigencies, and under all circumstances, till exhausted nature sinks into the grave. The whole of human life therefore, with all its changes, whether progressive or occasional, is the subject of our meditation and the object of our labor and our care. Man thus becomes the great study of our profession : his physical formation, his intellectual powers, the effects of the mysterious connexion in his being be- tween mind and matter ; the inscrutable nature of his principle of life; his adaptation to social and domestic relations ; his moral ten- dencies and liis religious capacities ; the double nature which makes him, while a child of earth, an heir of immortality—all these be- long to that study and contemplation of man to which our daily vocation leads us. And, while the subject of the studies and the labors of our pro- fession is the noblest of God's creation on earth, the preservation of his life and health, his morals and his happiness, its one great ob- ject, not less is it distinguished by the vast extent of its collateral relations, and the mighty and immense range of agencies and in- strumentalities it employs. It contemplates the qualities and con- ditions of all inanimate substances, of all living things, of all things immaterial, intangible, imponderable. For her remedies, medicine searches thro' all the works of nature, flies over the surface of the whole globe, penetrates beneath the surface, studies, examines, analyses every animal, every vegetable, every mineral production. Receiving their collections from the geologist, the botanist and the zoologist, whom she has sent out to explore the kingdoms of nature, she places them in the hands of her chemist to analyze and to combine; and even employs him to make new combinations which nature does not afford ; and all this for the health of man. Thus extended her researches, thus minute her investigations, and such the purpose of the high, noble and deep studies and pur-