Professional morality in 1831, or the lawyer's defence of medical quackery : in which John St. John Long's discoveries are examined, and his claims to the confidence of the British public, are criticised / by a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, and a master of surgery and arts.

Date:
1831
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Professional morality in 1831, or the lawyer's defence of medical quackery : in which John St. John Long's discoveries are examined, and his claims to the confidence of the British public, are criticised / by a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, and a master of surgery and arts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    fore, an act of as gross empiricism in thq Member of the Inner Temple to defend Long on such a subject of offence, as it is for Long to assume the exercise and the privileges of medicine, without an appropriate education or professional pretensions ; and the only excuse, which such defence can plead, is that sympathy of feeling which generally influences men who advocate the same principles, and who are beholden to the same resources for support. As law is taught and practised in the present day, too little respect in general is paid by it to the most vital interests of morality—to the eternal distinctions by which truth and falsehood, vice and virtue are separated* Every case of crime, it matters not how naked or how monstrous, can at the present day find an advocate, and a defence in our courts justice. Virtue is daily brow- beaten and vanquished in support of vice; fraud is glossed over by the smooth tongue of eloquence, and is invested with the features either of unsuspecting sim- plicity or some unoffending folly; and the murderer himself flies to the law for shelter from the pangs of conscience, and finds commiseration in the chartered advocate of morality, when the voice both of God and man calls aloud for judgment. The fact is—and surely it is a most melancholy fact—that the very institutions which our Government has established and consecrated for the protection of virtue, for the punishment of vice, and for the general growth of morality in our land, have degenerated into refuges for the most worthless, and receptacles for the most wicked of our population. In place of being seminaries of moral principle, in place of encouraging and rewarding honesty, in place of punish- ing and disgracing fraud, in place of being asylums to