The address delivered at the Third Anniversary Meeting of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association : held at Oxford, on Thursday, July 23d, 1835 / by J.C. Prichard ; with an account of the proceedings at that meeting, &c. &c. &c.
- Prichard, James Cowles, 1768-1848.
- Date:
- 1835
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The address delivered at the Third Anniversary Meeting of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association : held at Oxford, on Thursday, July 23d, 1835 / by J.C. Prichard ; with an account of the proceedings at that meeting, &c. &c. &c. 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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![1] servation, and will in no instance allow the degree of evidence arising from analogy^ to amount to any- thing more than probability. It is obvious that the principles of reasoning which are now universally acknowledged must prevent the future success of all systemic theories of medicine, unless the medical sciences should become perfected in a degree of which we have at present no conception. What, then, we may be ready to inquire, are the principles which are destined to govern the art of medicine during this long interval? Are we abandoned to a total anarchy; ajid is it our fate, after having given up so many systems one after another, to fall at last into mere empiricism, and to try experiments by adventure? It is fortunate that we are not thus driven from one extreme to another. We find a middle ground, on which a more secure foundation may be laid. By applying the strict rules of induc- tion to medical researches, the art and practice of reasoning on subjects of this nature have been brought into what may be termed the strictly ra- tional method of inquiry. This consists in in- vestigating, in every disease, and in every particu- lar case, the actual pathological state on which the symptoms depend, or with which they coexist. It IS' not, like the theories of medicine, of which I have alluded to the most celebrated in our time, an attempt to deduce from assumed physiological principles, all the changes which may, possibly, 01 may not, occur; or to determine how, and by what laws ot the animal economy, every link in the series of morbid phenomena has followed its antece- dent. The strictly inductive method of reasouimv](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22408654_0017.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
