The moral character of the medical profession : an address introductory to the course of public lectures in the New York Medical College, session of 1852-3 / by E.R. Peaslee.

  • Edmund Randolph Peaslee
Date:
1852
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The moral character of the medical profession : an address introductory to the course of public lectures in the New York Medical College, session of 1852-3 / by E.R. Peaslee. 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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    IS I,, be actually such, and never alludes to the fad : while a physician's moral and rehgioua principles are narrowly scanned, folly ascer- tained, and made not only a Bubjecl of remark, bul also a matter of feeling, with his patients. And this is as it should be; and let him who cannot Btand the ordeal, withdraw to Bome other vocation. It would not be difficult to show, I think, that medical men, as a class, are far more religiously inclined than other men, excepting clergymen, instead of being less so. •• I assume for clergymen, says Rev. Dr. Putnam, before quoted, no superiority in virtue or the sentiments and sympathies of humanity, over physicians—the physician enters the chamber of sick- ness and the Bcenes of pain, death,and sorrow, with as soft a tread, as -•.■ml,, a voice, and with as warm a current of affection in his heart as the clerg] man. Many might he named who, like Sydenham,Boerhaave, Ambros Pare, Hey of Leeds, Hope, and Brodie, and many others still living, and in our own country, adorn their profession even more if possible, by their christian character, than by their splendid intellectual and practical acquirements. Still, I am free to allow that, from supersti- tion and fanaticism, medical men, as a class, have ever kept aloof, and the peculiar character of their studies accounts for this fact. Espe- cially applicable to the physician in this respect, is the well-known passage from Virgil— Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, Atque metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum, Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari. And 1 should not, in justice to my profession, fail here to speak of the vast influence in favor of morality and religion, which has been exerted by medical men. Tin- whole science of moral as well as of intellectual philosophy has been essentially constructed by the labors of medical men. John Locke, Hartley, Mackintosh, and Brown, were all medical men ; and the writings of Bonnet, Abercrombie, Fothergill, Jones, Lettsom, ami Rush, of our own country, have exerted a powerful religious in- fluence. Indeed, I ought also to add that even the Reformation in Ger- many from Rationalism,* second in importance only to that accom- * An English clergyman—a Dr. Farmer—first instigated this phase of skepti- cism by his work on Demoniacs.
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