The progress of ophthalmic surgery : from the invention of the ophthalmoscope (in 1851) up to the present time : being an oration delivered before the North London Medical Society on February 11, 1863 / by John Zachariah Laurence.

  • Laurence, John Zachariah, 1828?-1870.
Date:
1863
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The progress of ophthalmic surgery : from the invention of the ophthalmoscope (in 1851) up to the present time : being an oration delivered before the North London Medical Society on February 11, 1863 / by John Zachariah Laurence. 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.

    19/26 (page 17)
    going on in the organism—an excess of acid, or alkali, engen- dering what was recognised as disease. Thus says Sprengel, ' He degraded the physician to the level of the brewer/ In England this school was especially taken up by Willis; whilst in France the Hippocratic and Galenic were the prevalent doctrines. The iatro-mathematical school originated in Italy with Borelli's treatise, ' De Motu Animalium' (PortaPs History of Anatomy, iii. 246), in which the principles of mechanics were applied to the actions of the muscles. John Bernoulli even went so far as to introduce the differential calculus into such investigations.* Then we have Van Helmont^s school of Vitalism—a principle supposed to preside over the body, and directly opposed to the influence of mechanical and chemical agents. At last, however, the empirical or inductive school, first steadfastly insisted on by Haller, under the auspices of the illustrious Sydenham, gradually asserted its legitimate supremacy. Were I asked to designate with one word the prevailing characteristic of the Medicine of to-day, I should say it was Materialism. Indeed, the more our senses have been assisted by physical science, the stronger has the material nature of disease stood out in relief. The first grand application of such aids to diagnosis we find in the sciences of percussion and auscultation, which, alluded to upwards of 2,000 years ago by Hippocrates, and still more definitely by Hooke, was in 1761 made the subject of a formal discourse by Leopold Aven- brugger; to be again forgotten for nearly half a century, till rescued from oblivion, and established on an undying basis, by the genius and energy of Corvisart and Lsennec. Nothing has, however, more strongly impressed medicine with its pre- sent material character, than the revelations of pathological anatomy, which is daily tending more closely to connect the symptoms of disease with material changes in the organism * However far-fetched this may appear, it is being strictly imitated by several of the modern speculative German writers on ophthalmic ' surgery.'