Introductory lecture to a course of lectures on the institutions of medicine / by John Fletcher.

Date:
1830
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Introductory lecture to a course of lectures on the institutions of medicine / by John Fletcher. 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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    not meet these appeals—if, in the first company he enters in the town in which he has set up his brass plate, he meet with a dozen persons better informed on these subjects than himself? An ignorant medi- cal man of the present day, in addition to all his practical high crimes and misdemeanours, must al- most necessarily be a despicable shuffler. No man can know every thing; but he who knows much can afford openly to confess when he is at a loss. An ignorant professional man, on the contrary, cannot afford to be honest. He must equivocate, and hedge, and lie, at every turn ; and be obliged to take, per- haps during a long life, ten times the trouble in or- der to appear well informed, which it would have cost him, during a few months, while a student, to become so. But all will not do ; he will soon see that he is known and despised, and soon feel that he is neglected and abandoned. <D So much then for the arguments commonly ad- duced against the cultivation of the study of the Theory of Medicine, as useless either to the medical man, or to the man of the world ; but an additional and very forcible argument on the opposite side may be collected from a consideration of what would ne- cessarily become its condition if this were deserted —in other words, of what has always been its condi- tion in those countries in which Theory has either never had a beginning, or has afterwards, from po- litical degradation, been abandoned ; and of what is still its condition with those persons among us who, from either weakness of intellect, or defect of edu- cation, from infancy or old age, are incapable of Theo-