On the difficulty of estimating the therapeutical value of medicinal agents : being the address delivered to the Harveian Society at their annual meeting on the 13th April 1857 / by Archibald Inglis.

Date:
1857
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the difficulty of estimating the therapeutical value of medicinal agents : being the address delivered to the Harveian Society at their annual meeting on the 13th April 1857 / by Archibald Inglis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    covery, should be inclined to despise theoretical inquiries, and, con- tenting themselves with the improved means of diagnosis of the present day, and a materia rnedica purified from many excrescences, and at the same time augmented by useful additions, should chiefly trust to their own experience and discrimination in the application of the^'materials placed at their disposal. On the other hand, con- sidering the tendency of the human mind to theorize, it is not sur- prising that others, partly repelled by the complex nature of the investigations required, and partly induced by the extent to which, of late years, the investigation of laws connecting a limited number of phenomena has led to the discovery of more general laws, and to the facility of applying our knowledge to practical ends to which such generalizations give rise, should, passing over the laborious processes through which these laws have been established, have adopted, upon insufficient data, theories of great apparent simplicity, by which they have imagined that all the phenomena of disease could be accounted for, and the operation of all medicines explained by referring their mode of action to one or two simple principles. That both these methods of proceeding are unphilosophical, is pretty obvious; but of the two, that which is analogous to the empiricism of ancient times has generally led to the most useful results, or, at all events, has been the least obstructive to the true progress of scientific medicine. That it has been so, however, has chiefly arisen from the impossibility of any method of practice being emi)irical, in the strict acceptation of the term. The practitioner who attempts to follow such a method, is obliged to assume, in the first place, that there is a certain degree of conclusiveness in the evidence that has led his predecessors to make use of particular medicines or plans of treatment in various diseases; he must assume also that there is a certain amount of resemblance in the cases he attempts to ti'eat by them to those in which they have been already successfully ap- plied ; and, if his experience is of any real value to him, it is so by his assuming, that wdiat he has found successful in certain cases, may be applied with advantage to others similar to, though not exactly identical with, them. Nor is this all; for, if he be an acute observer, he will scarcely fail to find out some of the modifying cir- cumstances which occasionally render the results of his practice different from what he might have anticipated, and to seek for some means of adapting his treatment to tliose circumstances. In all this he is a theorizer, and not an empiric; and the defects in his system consist not in the complete absence of theory, but in his making no attempt to account for the phenomena he observes, nor to connect them together in such a way that any very general rules of practice could be founded on them. Nevertheless, many impor- tant facts may be recorded, and even discoveries made, by such observers; and the accumulation of these furnishes to others the Materials from which more general principles can be elicited. Un the other hand, hasty attempts at generalization, founded