On the aims and philosophic method of pathological research: an inaugural address delivered at St. Thomas's Hospital. December 15th, 1847 / by John Simon.

  • John Simon
Date:
[1847]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the aims and philosophic method of pathological research: an inaugural address delivered at St. Thomas's Hospital. December 15th, 1847 / by John Simon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/52 page 15
    hension of those uncouth shapes within the simpli¬ city of intelligible laws. Tiedemann and Meckel first established in detail the great conception which had floated dimly before the mind of Wolff, and to which Hunter had given clear utterance; this, namely—that the embryo of each higher animal, in the progressive phases of its development, passes rapidly through the forms of the animals inferior to it; or, in Hunter's own words, that 44 if we were to take a series of animals from the more imperfect to the perfect, we should find an imperfect animal corre¬ sponding with some stage of the most perfect.” Thus at once was furnished a physiological standard for interpreting the apparent anomalies of birth ;— a standard rapidly applied by the great philo¬ sophers who had established it. They saw and an¬ nounced that, if the development of the embryo should be interrupted at some early stage of its regular evolution, any one of its transient shapes would be preserved as a specific permanent de¬ formity. We owe it to the principle of analogical interpretation thus illustrated, that, at the present moment, all who are conversant with the normal development of the embryo are able to refer the origin of monstrous births to specific moments of intra-uterine life, and to the excess or deficiency of acts generically normal. It was with a clear pro¬ phecy of such fruit as this, that Lord Bacon urged his contemporaries to the observation of whatever in Nature might seem causeless and capricious :—non ab inquisitione desistendum, donee ea quee possunt
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image