Four letters on homoeopathy : addressed to a manager of the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, with an appendix on homoeopathic statistics / by Alexander Harvey.

Date:
1868
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Four letters on homoeopathy : addressed to a manager of the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, with an appendix on homoeopathic statistics / by Alexander Harvey. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    in fact, in a way that defies the skill of the most cunning to purge. As to the residue on the register (large or small), the final result—death or recovery—will, with a certain number, and quite independently of the treatment pur- sued, be contingent, or will hinge, on fifty different condi- tions—on such conditions as age, sex, habit of body, habits of life, occupation, position in life, and the manifold ad- juncts of life. Eliminate, now, all this portion of the resi- due, and what remains to you statistically ? Nothing as to which (for the purpose now in hand) you can attach any value whatever. Nothing, in short, but a caput mortuum. As to one of Dr. Keith’s statistical headings, namely, “ Fever, excluding Typhus ” (p. 22), he does not need me to tell him that a column of that sort in an Hospital or a Dis- pensary Register, is a kind of Waste-BasJcet, into which everything is cast, from the slightest feverishness from cold, to the severest form of febrile “ perturbation,” which cannot be linked with its essential cause ; nor yet that the inherent peril attaching to such a motley group will be in the ratio of from 0 to 1000. Here we have a positive plethora of fallacies. And this leads me to remark next, that even under such definite headings as Pneumonia, Pleurisy, Peritonitis, Dysentery, there will be found in all Hospital and Dispen- sary Registers, errors innumerable. Besides that every one of these diseases varies exceedingly in intensity, and, therefore, in danger, mistakes (avoidable or unavoidable) in the discrimination (diagnosis) of cases at the bed-side, are fruitful of statistical inaccuracies. Take Pneumonia (or inflammation of the lungs) for an illustration. Under this head, will be included cases not of that nature; and there will be excluded from it (entered under another head) genuine cases of the disease. The extent to which statis- tics are vitiated in this way, is anything but inconsider- able. Take another source of fallacy attaching to medical sta-