Medicine an art, and its truth to be attained. Being an address ... at the opening meeting of the "Library of the Exeter Dispensary", and the "Devon and Exeter Pathological Society" / [Thomas Shapter].

  • Shapter, Thomas
Date:
1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medicine an art, and its truth to be attained. Being an address ... at the opening meeting of the "Library of the Exeter Dispensary", and the "Devon and Exeter Pathological Society" / [Thomas Shapter]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    22/32 (page 22)
    or cause. This, with many, has constituted their sole aim and process of inquiry. So largely and extensively has this error prevailed, that in its pursuit much valuable labour has been uselessly expended in vain repetitions of the same observations. Hence, while huge treatises have been written on many of the prevailing and most interesting diseases, nothing beyond the first hasty description is really known of them. Within this category may be included the Asiatic cholera, the influenza, &c. Another error is the extravagant appreciation of the revela¬ tions of morbid anatomy. There are those who, largely falling into this error, have recognised in the appearances after death, the cause not only of the death itself, but of all preceding disorder ; while, probably, the preceding disorder has been the cause of the appearances thus laid bare. The longest established and most serious illustration of this, is the too familiar one of consump¬ tion ; the extreme condition of the lung has absorbed attention to the exclusion of the constitutional disorder which has pre¬ ceded it. Another, and not infrequent error of pathological observation, has been to consider as belonging and essential to the history of a disease all the lesions which may have been observed in all the various and differing cases of such disease as may have occurred; thus, that which is only concomitant, is mixed up with, or even mistaken for, that which is essential, and consequently is as¬ sumed to be characteristic while it is only accidental; thus the pathological condition of a fever has been made to comprise almost every lesion to which the human frame is liable, instead of excluding all lesions but such as were universally or generally observed. We have now seen that the art of medicine is beset with various fallacies and errors, tending to clothe it with an uncer¬ tainty which, as an art, does not belong to it. This great prin¬ ciple may, however, be relied upon, that in the art of medicine there is a right and a wrong way ; this, to be avoided, as rendering