Lectures on inflammation and ulceration of the cervix uteri / by Henry Miller.

  • Miller, Henry, 1800-1874.
Date:
[1855?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on inflammation and ulceration of the cervix uteri / by Henry Miller. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    posed, it was not to be expected that the innovation would be adopted, until it had received the sanction of experience and the stamp of criticism. Accordingly the speculum and its revelations, its uses and abuses, have given rise to much animated discussion and, in not a few instances, to acrimonious criticism, mingled with personal abuse and downright blackguardism. In the temper and phraseology of these lectures of Dr. West, I find nothing that is exceptionable. His style is chaste and his manner is courteous and dignified. But the means which he has resorted to to disparage and, to the extent of his abilities, render contemptible the doctrine and practice of those from whom he differs, are not so laudable. After the most careful perusal of his lectures, my deliberate judgment is, that for whatever force or point they may possess, they are indebted to such a partial state¬ ment of the doctrine oppugned as amounts to actual misrepresen¬ tation. Not that Dr. West is ignorant of the doctrine he has undertaken to explode, or that he has failed to set it forth, once ;and again, in various parts of his lectures. But these full and explicit statements of it appear only in the course of his discursive ■remarks and in an incidental manner. When they are made to assume the distinct and substantive form of a proposition, which is to be sustained or refuted, then the resort to the artifice of a mutilated statement may be easily discovered, and to this and this ■ i alone he owes the apparent victory which he achieves in the con¬ troversy. Nor are these lectures free from the vice of dissimulation. When Dr. West wings an argument and succeeds, to his satisfaction, in infixing its point in the obnoxious doctrine, he is wont to assume a philosophical air, and caution his hearers agains yielding too implicitly to its force, for after all, the doctrine which it seems to refute may be valid and its validity may perhaps be established by counter evidence of greater potency. This apparent ingenuous¬ ness and, as I must regard it, affectation of philosophical caution and distrust, mightily predisposes the reader to submit himself to the guidance of Dr. West and quietly to adopt whatever conclu¬ sions he may reach. To justify these general reflections, let us proceed to a critical examination of the work before us.