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.

    6/26 (page 6)
    scale of philosophical inquiry is too undecided to admit of definition; and that the only description of it is to be derived from a brief inquiry into the mode in which it has been cultivated by our prede- cessors and contemporaries: and from this review, the answer to my second question, is the mode of co-operation which we adopt, that best calculated to effect its progress ? must be furnished. When the infirmities of flesh, the many pangs and sufferings it endured, first led man to contemplate his feUow-man as matter tending always to dec'ay, and ponder o'er his ailments and their cure, with what amazement must he have surveyed this most complex of all created things ! With little less than awe must he have viewed this marvellous whole,—combining all the attributes of brutes with mind and spirit, and yet its parts so knit; and blended, so diverse, still com- pact, as that he could but look on its entirety. He could not separate the organic life, the instinctive gift, the reasoning mind, the immortal soul. Nor could he solve the wondrous problems he beheld of motion in its varied forms :—solids and fluids obe- dient to its laws,—of sense administering food to reason,—of sustenance and growth,—of waste and death,—and ruling over all some power unseen, in- scrutable. Well might he have exclaimed with Young, How reason reels!— Oh, what a miracle to man is man! Whence could he draw the facts on which to base his notions of disease ? He could but watch the errors