Lecture, introductory to the study of medicine, delivered in Anderson's University, on 2d November 1842.

  • Easton, J. A. (John Alexander), 1807-1865.
Date:
1842
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lecture, introductory to the study of medicine, delivered in Anderson's University, on 2d November 1842. 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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    value of a medical practitioner, not from the amount of his professional knowledge, for of that they are no judges, but from the extent and variety of his general attainments; and they naturally enough conclude that he who is destitute of the latter is not likely to be overburdened with the former. Now I willingly admit, that there is some fallacy in this reasoning, and that great talent in medicine is not always adorned with the graces of polite literature, or combined in some cases with the humbler adjunct even of ordinary scholarship. The obscure carpenter, who emerged nearly a hundred years ago from a neighbouring village, and re- paired to the great metropolis, could neither write gramma- tically, nor spell correctly, yet by the native force of his mighty intellect, he revolutionised the empire of medicine, so that the civilized world—a Gadibus usque ad Ganges,— will ring till the end of time with the praises of John Hunter. But though I hope I am addressing many who will emulate the fame and imitate the zeal of that illustri- ous man, it were the grossest flattery to say that you were all endowed with his genius; and therefore let me impress upon you, that a blemish, which was unheeded in a Hunter, because lost in the blaze of his natural talents, will be ex- posed and ridiculed in one of his less gifted successors, and that consequently it becomes a matter of policy—to say nothing of its intrinsic value and importance—not only in the student, but also in the practitioner of medicine, to cultivate these departments of literature in which the un- initiated in medicine take pleasure, and by his attainments
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