On mental training and relaxation in the study of medicine.

  • Brown, John.
Date:
[1851]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On mental training and relaxation in the study of medicine. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    young readers. Arnauld’s famous and most excellent and enter- taining “ Art of Thinking” is, if only one be taken, probably the best. Thomson’s little book is admirable, and is specially suited for a medical student, as its illustrations are drawn with great intelligence and exactness from chemistry and physiology. We know nothing more perfect than the analysis, at page 348, of Sir H. Davy’s beautiful experiments, to account for the traces of an alkali he found when decomposing water by galvanism. It is quite exquisite, the hunt after and the unearthing of “ the residual cause” This book has the great advantage of a clear, lively, and strong style. We can only give some short extracts. INDUCTION AND DEDUCTION. “We may define the inductive method as the process of discovering laws and rules from facts, and causes from effects ; and the deductive, as the method of deriving facts from laws, and effects from their causes.” There is a valuable paragraph on anticipation and its uses—there is a power and desire of the mind to project itself from the known to the unknown, in the hope of finding what it is in search of. “ This power of divination, this sagacity, which is the mother of all science, we may call anticipation. The intellect, with a dog-lilce instinct, will not hunt until it has found the scent. It must have some presage of the result before it will turn its energies to its attainment. The system of anatomy which has immortalised the name of Oken, is the consequence of a flash of an- ticipation, which glanced through his mind when he picked up in a chance walk, the skull of a deer, bleached by the weather, and exclaimed—1 It is a vertebral column ! ’ ” “ The man of science possesses principles—the man of art, not the less nobly gifted, is possessed and carried away by them. The principles which art involves, science evolves. The truths on which the success of art depend lurk in the artist’s mind in an undeveloped state, guiding his hand, stimulating his invention, balancing his judgment, but not appearing in regular proposi- tions.” “ An art (that of medicine for instance) will of course admit into its limits, everything (and nothing else) which can conduce to the performance of its oum proper work; it recognises no other principles of selection.” “ He who reads a book on logic, probably thinks no better when he rises up than when he sat down, but if any of the principles there unfolded, cleave to his memory, and he afterwards, perhaps unconsciously, shapes and corrects his thoughts by them, no doubt the whole powers of his reasoning receive benefit. In a word, every art, from reasoning to riding and rowing, is learnt by assiduous practice, and if principles do any good, it is proportioned to the readiness with which they can be converted into rules, and the patient constancy with which they are applied in all our attempts at excellence.” “ A man can teach names to another man, but he cannot plant in another’s mind that far higher gift—the power of naming. “ Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and eflicient instru- ment in thinking.” “ The whole of every science may be made the subject of teaching. Not so with art; much of it is not teachable.” Coleridge’s profound and brilliant, but unequal, and often some- what nebulous “ Essay on Method,” is worth reading over, were it only as an exercitation, and to impress on the mind the meaning and value of method. Method is the road by which you attain, or hope to attain, a certain end ; it is a process. It is the best direction for