An inauagural discourse : on the policy of establishing a school of medicine in the city of Memphis, Tennessee / by the editor.
- Cross, James Conquest.
- Date:
- 1847
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: An inauagural discourse : on the policy of establishing a school of medicine in the city of Memphis, Tennessee / by the editor. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)
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![versally adopted, may be certainly inferred from the following declaration made in the last annual announcement of one of the first Schools of Medicine in the Union:—The facilities which Philadelphia affords for medical instiuction are certainly varied and ample, and adapted for every region. The great principles of pathology and therapeutics can never be sectional; they are of universal application. In opposition to the authority of a very learned body, we beg leave to quote an equally emphatic declar- ation from a recent and an able French writer, who had, for many years, been a close observer of disease in very various cli- mates. He says:—De meme que pays possede son regne vege- tal et son regne animal caracteristiques; dememeil possede aussi «on regne pathologique a lui; il a ses maladies prop res, et exclu- sives de certaines autres. But this question, so important and in- teresting, is not to be settled by a reference to authorities, but by an appeal to facts. Now what is a great principle? To our understanding it is an ultimate fact or law, to which the various phenomena in any department of observation and experience are referred, as is illustrated by the reference that is made of the phenomena observed in the inanimate world to certain laws of motion, of gravitation, of chemical affinity, &c. Dr. Bartlett in- forms us that, A law, or principle, of physical science consists in a rigorous and [an] absolute generalization of facts, phenomena, events and relationships; and in nothing else. It is identical with the universality of a phenomenon, or the invariableness of a rela- tionship, which is equivalent to what Mr. Mill says in his System of Logic, that Ultimate laws are observed uniformities of Nature which cannot be resolved into more general laws; or as Webster defines a principle to be a truth admitted without proof, or considered as having been before proved. Without desiring to intimate that medicine is a vague and an uncertain sci- ence, we ask is there any thing in pathology or therapeutics which can be justly regarded as complying with the requisitions of either of the above definitions of a principle, an ultimate law or an universally admitted truth? If so, then we acknowledge, with shame and remorse, that we are ignorant of it. If there should be, however, no such prodigy in medicine, and of this we are firmly convinced, then there are no great principles of pathology and therapeutics of universal application, and what](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21112009_0010.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
