An address delivered at the first anniversary meeting of the Birmingham School of Medicine and Surgery / [James Thomas Law].

  • Law, James Thomas, 1790-1876.
Date:
1835
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An address delivered at the first anniversary meeting of the Birmingham School of Medicine and Surgery / [James Thomas Law]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    master-passion, acting sympathetically on the nerves, and baffling the utmost skill of the anatomist and demonstrator. It was a sudden and powerful emotion of the mind which is said to have caused the death of Mr. John Hunter, and which still continues to strike down its thousands and tens of thou¬ sands. Does not anger, by producing a violent rush of blood to the head and heart, endanger the vital organs by an excess of fulness and dilation ? Do not even joyful emotions, which in moderation tend to light up the countenance with that animated glow of pleasure which is so beautiful to behold, when carried to excess, sometimes occasion the destruction of life ? Disappointment pines away—Grief drags it slow length along. They cause a death-like paleness to overspread the countenance, by weakening the vascular system and obstructing the circulation. The patient is seen to heave deep sighs and struggle for breath; the blood, which no longer circulates freely, being collected in the larger vessels to repletion and gorging the lungs. Which of us has not felt more or less of some one perhaps of all these various emotions of the mind? Is the rich man exempt ? Ah, no! Can the poor man say he is free ? Alas, not so ! Does learning raise its possessor above the operation of these causes? Many learned men surround me; will they not be the first to confess they are but men ! Are the igno¬ rant, then, the sole exception? Not so, indeed; for then ignorance would be bliss. They are the weakest and the worst, for over them reason exercises the least controul, and the passions reign more unsubdued and tyrannize more imperiously. We say then—let every one who wishes to become a suc¬ cessful practitioner study to make himself acquainted with the source of those thousand emotions of the mind which set the bodily machine in motion—at one time propelling it violently forward, at another holding it back in torpid inaction. So