Truants : the story of some who deserted medicine yet triumphed / by Lord Moynihan of Leeds.

  • Moynihan, Berkeley Moynihan, Baron, 1865-1936.
Date:
1936
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Truants : the story of some who deserted medicine yet triumphed / by Lord Moynihan of Leeds. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    nor will it be silenced until men recognise that medicine has contact with both, with science in its enquiries, with art in its practice. Hippo¬ crates, like all ancient Greek authors, speaks of medicine not as an art but as “the Art”; and he writes “Where the love of man is there is also love of the Art.” It is remarkable that the method of observa¬ tion should have taken its origin in a direction where its exercise is most difficult. In other sciences phenomena presented for observation are “pure”; in medicine they are rarely un¬ affected by passage through the patient’s mind which seeks to interpret yet unwittingly inter¬ poses a veil of obscurity. The observer is then confronted with phenomena not as they exist, but impure, in varying degree adulterated by the mind or affected by the will or the tempera¬ ment of the sufferer. For us in medicine, then, Hippocrates stands for the ideal physician, a man of purest integrity, humane in thought and in every action, the unwearied collector and collator of all truths accessible to the most acute observation; the first to utter great generalisations in reference to any science. For centuries his followers added