Reminiscences of a medical life : with cases and practical illustrations / By Jonathan Toogood.

  • Toogood, Jonathan, 1784-1870.
Date:
1853
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Reminiscences of a medical life : with cases and practical illustrations / By Jonathan Toogood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    him the information he seeks, and he searches systems and authorities in vain, when an unusual case occurs. This, however, is not without its advantage, by obliging him to rely on his own resources, and making him more original in his ideas, and more fertile in expedients. It was a saying of Luther, u that a man lives forty years before he finds himself to be a fool, and at the time he begins to see his folly, his life is nearly finished, so that many men die before they begin to I by no means venture to assert that this saying literally applies to the medical profession; yet I believe, if men re- they did not find themselves as wise at forty as they imagined themselves to be when they entered on their professional career. For there are some (even in our own profession) upon whom the continuance of life, and all the means of improvement, seems to be thrown away. They pass through a life full of instructive scenes and interesting occurrences—but they travel in a hearse. Dr. Johnson, speaking of the medical profession, says : “ It is a melancholy attendance on misery, a mean submission to peevishness, and a constant interruption to pleasure.” Few, I imagine, will agree in this churlish sentiment; for although the proper discharge of our duties involves a large space of our time and great personal sacrifice, yet the reflection on a life devoted to the alleviation of the sufferings of our fellow creatures, is accompanied with higher feelings of satisfaction, and a more enviable reward than the acquisition of wealth. Mr. Lawrence says, in the concluding address of his last lecture on “Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man,” “ Our professional ministrations introduce us to our fellow creatures in the most endearing character, as instruments of unquestionable benefit; not merely in alleviating or removing the severe pressure of that great evil, bodily pain, and protracting the approach of that awful moment, from which all sentient beings shrink back with instinctive dread, the termination of existence, but in soothing the acuter anguish which near relations and friends feel for each live.” viewed their practice, they would candidly acknowledge that LIBRARY v
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