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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    either on an insufficient number of facts, on inaccurate observation of them, or on incorrect assumptions as to their causal connection, serve only to retard the true progress of the science, and, conse- quently, of the art of medicine. Their apparent simplicity, and often their plausibility, may gain them advocates for a time, and the facility with which, owing to the sources of fallacy we have already pointed out, the facts passing under daily observation can be made to bend to preconceived notions as to the manner in which they can be explained, may give them powerful sway even over a considerable number of the profession, but careful observation and experiment at length succeed in pointing out their insufficiency, and producing their overthrow. In this manner the theories of Brown and of Broussais, resting in part on observed facts, which, rightly inter- preted, have their significance, but the range of which was far too limited to serve as a foundation for constituting theories intended for general application, could only maintain their reputation for a limited period; and, when it was discovered that they were at vari- ance with many easily observed facts of daily occurrence, soon ceased to be regarded as furnishing a key to the interpretation of morbid phenomena, or indicating any general rule for the treatment of disease. Nor can we doubt, when such has been the fate of theories which, to a certain extent, were constructed from acknow- ledged facts, that in other instances of more recent date, where they have been made to rest on principles assumed in the first in- stance before any facts could be adduced to support them, and more especially where hypothesis has been heaped on hypothesis, with the hope of overcoming the stubborn resistance with which facts refused to accommodate themselves to the forced and unna- tural interpretations endeavoured to be put upon them, such theo- ries, however popular for a time, will, ere long, sink into their merited insignificance. While it is evident, then, from the abortive result of the attempts hitherto made to establish a general theory of the treatment of disease, as well as from the incomplete, and even, in some instances, almost rudimentary, state of our knowledge of some of the phenomena necessary for its construction, that there does not yet exist a suffi- cient accumulation of facts for such a purpose, it is not to be inferred that no progress has been made towards it. It may be, that, owing to the complex nature of the forces by which the living organism is acted on, no theory of general application to all cases will ever be arrived at; but we are not, therefore, to regard all we know^ as a col- lection of isolated facts. In spite of the retardation, and sometimes even retrogression, produced either by scepticism as to tlie reality of our progress, or by too hasty inferences from ascertained facts, we are, in the present day, beyond all former periods, advancing in two most important particulars required in the inductive process, namely, in the first place, the tracing, by observation and experiment, the chain of causation, both backwards and forwards, of the phenomena