Two lectures : I. Lectures, books, and practical teaching ; II. Clinical instruction / by W.T. Gairdner.

Date:
1877
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Two lectures : I. Lectures, books, and practical teaching ; II. Clinical instruction / by W.T. Gairdner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    structure of preliminary doctrines or aphorisms, on which, as on an hypothesis, all the detailed investigation of individual cases or diseases was thereafter to rest. His method, therefore, was essentially that of the theologian; like that of Calvin in the Institutes, for example, or of Augustine in that great system of medifeval doctrine which was called Catholic, because it was supposed to be for all time and for every place alike, and which, in fact, has thus far corresponded with the title, that it was adopted in its main features and logical sequence by the Reformers no less than by the Church of Eome. The system of Boerhaave was eclectic; that is, it professed to be drawn from a comprehensive study of all previous doctrine in all ages, but especially in the immediately preceding age; it adopted freely whatever seemed to be well founded in the teaching of the mathematical (or rather mechanical) and of the chemical schools, and did not disdain the acknowledgment of its obligations to the past; but the ultimate end was to be a system, i.e., a scheme of doctrine so absolutely true, complete, and logically coherent as to have a reasonable look of finality about it. Hence the very language of Boerhaave, and of all his school, has become obsolete, because men have ceased to think of disease in general, or of diseases in detail, in terms of his underlying hypothesis. Take, for example, the primary divisions of his classification :—Diseases of a simple solid fibre ; of a weak and lax fibre; of a stifl and elastic fibre; of weak and lax viscera ; of too strong and rigid viscera ; fi-om an acid humour; from a spontaneous gluten; from an alkaline cause; all these are terms which convey absolutely no meaning, or scarcely any meaning at all, to a pathologist of the present day; and yet they are of the very essence of the doctrinal system of this great teacher, whose authority extended at one time from Vienna to the penitus toto orbe divises Britannos. You will not, I trust, suppose me to be making these re- ferences to Boerhaave with the view of unduly depreciating one whose character and immense erudition, added to vast stores of personal experience, give him an ample claim to all the fame he acquired, and to a permanent and honourable