An aboriginal girdle / by Edgar R. Waite.

  • Edgar Ravenswood Waite
Date:
[1923]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: An aboriginal girdle / by Edgar R. Waite. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    bears, no matter how intelligent they were in the long ago, that to occupy ourselves seriously with the history of medicine may be a pleasant occupation for an elderly physician who has nothing better to do, but can mean very little for the young man en¬ tering upon practice or for the physician busy with his patients. Medical history may be good enough for some book worm interested in dry as dust details for their own sake and perhaps because he rejoices in the fact that other people do not know them, but can have very little significance for the up to date physician. This is an impression that is dying hard just now, but it is dying. We are learning that there is very little that we are doing even now that has not been done before us and that above all the great physicians, no matter how long ago they wrote, al¬ ways have precious lessons for us that we cannot afford to neglect even though they be 300 or 600 or 1800 or even 2500 years ago. At all of these dates in the past there were physicians whose works will never die. In every department of human history the impres¬ sion that we are the only ones whose work is sig¬ nificant has been receiving a sad jolt in recent years, and perhaps in no branch of science is this so true as in medicine. We are coming to realize how much the physicians and surgeons of long distant times accomplished, and above all we are learning to ap¬ preciate that they approached problems in medicine at many periods of medical history in the best sci¬ entific temper of the modern time. Of course there were abuses, but then the Lord knows there are abuses now. Of course their therapeutics had many absurdities in it, but then let us not forget that Pro¬ fessor Charles Richet, the director of the department of physiology at the University of Paris, declared not long ago in an article in the best known of
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