Some aspects of the mental discipline associated with the study of medicine : an address delivered to the Queen Margaret College Medical Club / by C.O. Hawthorne.

  • Hawthorne, C. O. (Charles Oliver), 1858-1949.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Some aspects of the mental discipline associated with the study of medicine : an address delivered to the Queen Margaret College Medical Club / by C.O. Hawthorne. 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.

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    without knowledge is no part of the mental furniture provided by medical studies. It is not infrequently charged against the discipline of medicine that it stunts and atrophies the imagina- tive faculties, and this statement is worthy of a moment’s examination, more especially as it ofttimes issues from the interior of the profession itself. It may be admitted that we live in an age in which the con- ditions generally are unfavourable to the creation of mental images. The creation of such images needs for its vitality, in the first place, a narrow environment of facts with vast expanses of which absolutely nothing is known and which may be peopled with images without arousing a sense of impossibility or of improbability ; and, in the second place, what accom- panies such an environment, an absence of the critical spirit. To-day the picturesque imagery of the Greek mythology gives no motive to our lives, because our knowledge of facts is such that the statements there made outrage our sense of probability. Vulcan forging the thunderbolts of Jove in some subterra- nean cavern could easily be imagined by peoples to whom earthquakes and volcanoes were mysterious phenomena, but at the present day there is a primd- facie case against Vulcan, because, to say the least of it, he outrages our sense of probability. Earth- quakes and volcanoes we know to be expressions of natural forces, and Vulcan and all his apparatus of artifice we regard as a mere picturesque expres- c