An address delivered to the Hunterian Society / by Thomas Mee Daldy, the appointed orator for the year 1853.

  • Daldy, Thomas Mee.
Date:
1853
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An address delivered to the Hunterian Society / by Thomas Mee Daldy, the appointed orator for the year 1853. 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.

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    And I would here impress upon you the main argument of my address; namely, that on careful examination I think it will appear that the progress, both of the sciences ancillary to medicine and of medicine itself, when divested of all the tossings and heavings of those billows which the undisciplined mind of man raises up in the path of his search after truth, has been ultimately effected by a steady ad- herence to the method of first collecting the necessary facts, grouping those facts according to their per- ceptible correlativeness, then colligating them by the aid of an appropriate conception, and thence de- ducing a principle. Thus the slowly collected facts of anatomy, when Harvey had once made his own, furnished him with the means of first grouping that portion of them which related to the blood-vessels; then of colligating them by means of a preconceived and appropriate idea, suggested by his sagacity; and of ultimately deducing the principle of the circulation. Here we trace the first solid foundation of that para- mountly important science, conventionally termed Physiology, of which the broad basis was afterwards laid by that great man w^hose honoured name we assume,—a basis on which so splendid an edifice has been erected, mainly by the labours of the gentleman * on whom his mantle has so gracefully descended, and whom we are proud to rank amongst our honorary members. Step by step has €ach of those general laws, which now form the firm connecting links * Professor Owen. C