Medical ethics : a lecture, delivered December 23, 1843, before the Ohio Medical Lyceum / by John P. Harrison.

  • Harrison, John P. (John Pollard), 1796-1849.
Date:
1843
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical ethics : a lecture, delivered December 23, 1843, before the Ohio Medical Lyceum / by John P. Harrison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    There are certain injurious prejudices, popular errors, and vulgar misconceptions, which traverse the path of the physician's useful- ness. These he must manfully, yet temperately confront, and either put down by the weight of his authority, or disarm diem of their power to injure his patient by turning them aside from such an application as would interfere seriously in his scheme of cure. We should never permit the hand of prejudice to wrest from us the lancet, where we think it demanded. Nor should mercury be banished from our plans of treatment, because popular misconcep- tion anadiematizes its employment. Should a patient persist in a refusal to submit to our prescrip- tions he must be abandoned, but before leaving him it is our boun- den duty mildly to remonstrate at his perverseness. If friends pragmatically dictate let them be told that it ill becomes them to assume such authority, and in the vindication of our professional rights let us hold fast to our patient, if his confidence be unshaken in our skill. We should be not too rigid, severe, and exacting in our claims upon the faith of friends in the wisdom of the plan of treatment adopted. They may believe us skilful, and know that we are attentive, yet their anxiety leads them to watch with keen solicitude the changes of that disease which is preying upon the vital energies of a dear object of affection. Let us sympathize with their acuteness of feeling, and not attempt with scowling brow to beat down their expressions of apprehension for the issue of the case. Should they, however break in on our mode of treat- ment let them be made acquainted immediately with our deter- mination to throw the responsibility on their shoulders, and this will, ordinarily, be available for their retreat from the ground so unwisely taken by them. If this invasion on their part upon the sacred enclosure of professional prerogative amounts only to the officious administration of articles of diet expressly forbidden, we should with a mild severity chide them for their offence, and ex- hort them not to repeat the act. Let us, however, remember that that we deal with frail beings, both in the giving of our directions to the nurse, and in the exhibition of our medicines to the sick themselves. Whilst we strive to keep down the encroachments of ignorant presumption, and repress the erring efforts of well meaning friends, we should remember that we are not to erect our standard so high that but few will come up to it. Ultraism is to be avoided, whether it be the ultraism which shows itself in a lax- ness of dietetic discipline, or the ultraism which displays its more revolting features in a regimenal treatment, which becomes too rigid and inexorable to be accurately obeyed in nine tenths of the cases we may be called to treat.