Address to the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Edinburgh : delivered on the occasion of taking the chair of the Society, December 17, 1856 / by James Miller.
- James Miller
- Date:
- 1857
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Address to the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Edinburgh : delivered on the occasion of taking the chair of the Society, December 17, 1856 / by James Miller. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.
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![names, and after one little-varying slipshod fashion; seldom shaken out of this unseemly rut into which his wheels have fallen, save by some untoward event, the result of such negligence, which for a time recalls him to a more prudent and painstaking progress. Such a man obviously needs the spur; it is safe neither for himself nor for others that he be without it. And how can such friendly stimulus be better applied—more truly, more timeously—than in amicable reunion with his fellows, where interchange of thought, as well as of experience, goes freely round, and the awakening comes not after the untoward professional stumbling, but to prevent it ? 2. I mean, also, and mainly, the spirit of quackery, concealed under the cloak of professional knowledge, and practised in the guise of the scientific and the orthodox: the holding of a fair face to the public, while inwardly conversant with duplicity and guile. Should a man's mind be unfortunately constituted so as to predis- pose him to this, he will not only be warned of his risk, in such meetings as these, but he will also be so dealt with in his whole inner man, as either to escape the lapse, or obtain a speedy and safe correction. He cannot, from day to day, be an unconcerned and unimproved spectator of his brother practitioners meeting as brothers ought to meet, opening bosom to bosom, reasoning frankly and freely with one another as to the causes and courses of disease, as well as of the success and failure of remedies; making common stock, as it were, of their knowledge and experience, and seeking honestly to harmonize and enhance it all for the general good of suffering humanity. In such an atmosphere, the spirit of quackery cannot live ; it must sicken and die. 3. A third advantage is the exposure and sup])i'ession of heresy. In the multitude of counsellors there is safety. One man, or two or three men, may be readily enough deceived as to what is heretical. They may, on the one hand, imagine what is wrong to be right; or, on the other, what is right to be wrong. But let the matter come under the shrewd cognizance and sustained inquiry of numbers, such as durs; each man looking at it from his own peculiar point of view; one after another taking it by as many different handles as](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21466324_0010.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
