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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    The second question is not so easily to be disposed of. If it were possible to furnish a concise answer to the interrogation arising out of it,—What is medi- cine as a branch of knowledge ? —it would admit of an equally concise solution. But how are we to define medicine ? Shall we call it a science ? In an •able oration, delivered by one of our most learned members * some five years since, I think it was dis- tinctly proved that medicine is certainly not a science, in the restricted sense of the word, as implying an exact system of causation. In many parts of it we know the palpable proximate cause and the effect; but, as in the experiment with the billiard-balls, we know that the first is struck, and that the last moves without any perceptible movement of the intermediate ones; so in medicine, of what takes place between cause and effect we are too frequently in ignorance. Are we, then, to designate that species of learning which requires, in a large number of instances, an extended inductive sequence to arrive at its facts, and a further induction to work out its etiology, an art ? Art is the larval stage of every science,—through that stage medicine has passed: and although we cannot represent it as an Imago, it has certainly advanced to the extreme verge of its pupal life; and, indeed, abeady presents many lineaments which stamp it as the insect Science, if not perfect in all its parts. The difficulty appears to me to arise from our having to deal with a study, whose position in the * Dr. Barlow.