A plea for 'thoroughness' : introductory address delivered at the Yorkshire College, Leeds, at the opening of the session, October 1st, 1889 / by W.T. Gairdner.

  • Gairdner, Sir William Tennant, (1824-1907)
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A plea for 'thoroughness' : introductory address delivered at the Yorkshire College, Leeds, at the opening of the session, October 1st, 1889 / by W.T. Gairdner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    or as treated of in books, or in the lecture-room, but disease as occurring in the sick chamber or hospital. You will find it, I believe, to be the simple truth that at no time in the world’s history have the medical advisers of the sick been so little hampered by traditions as at present; at no time have the methods, the formulae, the remedies of past ages under- gone more revolutionary changes, and yet at no time have the living influence, the character, the personal status of the physician and surgeon been more adequately maintained than precisely in this latter end of this nineteenth century of ours. So much is this the case that if you take up a book which represents the traditions of even less than half a cen- tury ago, you will find these traditions almost entirely super- seded, and even hopelessly out of accord, on many points of the first importance, with the matured opinion of almost every one of our greatest masters of the art at this present hour, either in England or in any part of Europe. Not one in a hundred of the medicinal formulae so copiously scattered over the pages of Copland’s Dictionary, for instance, obtains any considerable amount of favour or support to-day; not one acute disease, probably, is treated as he and the greater number of his contemporaries would have treated it; nor is there a single article, perhaps not a single page, of that immense and voluminous work, on which the merest tiro of to-day would not be amply justified in writing numerous emendations and improvements, founded on the instructions and experience of a four-year’s medical curriculum ; and yet medical opinion, as such, and especially individual medical