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General pathology, as conducive to the establishment of rational principles for the diagnosis and treatment of disease : a course of lectures, delivered at St. Thomas's Hospital during the summer session of 1850, / by John Simon, F.R.S.

  • Simon, John, Sir, 1816-1904.
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: General pathology, as conducive to the establishment of rational principles for the diagnosis and treatment of disease : a course of lectures, delivered at St. Thomas's Hospital during the summer session of 1850, / by John Simon, F.R.S. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    divested of accidental complication, and stated in their ab- stract forms, or in their generalities of mutual connexion; to apprehend their laws of manifestation—not as mere empirical memories of what has been, but as the means for confident prediction of what will be; to apprehend classification—not as a mere trick of numerical notation, but according to the types or essential characters of things;—these are the acts of science. See, for instance, out of the innumerable variety of phe- nomena which we now refer to gravitation, — the weight of what is lifted, the velocity of what falls, the solidity of one object and the fluidity of another, from astro- nomical observations, from suggestions apparently so far asunder as the dropping of an apple, or the rounding of a dewdrop, and the measured sweeping of the planets; see, out of this heterogeneous crowd of sensuous impressions, how the single essential function has been educed by the matchless sagacity of Newton, as the centripetal tendency of matter; and see again how, in recognising the essential identity of phenomena so various, he likewise assigned their law or con- dition of manifestation with a completeness and simplicity quite unequalled in science: “the particles of matter attract each other with forces directly proportional to their masses, and inversely proportional to the squares of their distances.” Or observe, again, out of how many quantitative phenomena in chemistry, at first sight of little import or with little con- nexion, a law, of scarcely less magnitude than that of gravita- tion, has been developed by the genius of modern science, showing that the whole system of chemical combination is according to a numerical scale, in which every element and every union of elements has its possibilities of combination limited and defined in respect of every other element, or every other union of elements. Tn respect of the studies which are peculiar to our own pro- fession—those which relate to organized beings, there is the same distinction to be drawn between the mere perception or registration of phenomena, and their reduction to a scientific form; in these, as in other departments of knowledge, you ‘will find that the description of particular phenomena does not in itself constitute science.