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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    to those treated of by hiin. It will be readily observed, however, that, though some of the matters touched upon in the Address are closely allied to those which form the subject'of Sir John Forbes's publication, the object which I have kept in view is quite a distinct one. In reference to other writings on the same subject, I take this opportunity of pointing out that, when I wrote the remarks I have made at page 15, on the impossibility of expressing our present physiological, pathological, and therapeutical knowledge hyformulce as exact as those applicable to physical and chemical phenomena, I of course could not be aware that the author of a review of Sir John Forbes's work, in the British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review, since published, had been in the habit of making use of mathematical symbols for the illustration of the morbid processes taking place in the body, with a view to facilitate the rationale of our therapeutical applications. The example given by the reviewer appears to me to present a very good symbolical illustration of a form of calculation of the adaptation of therapeutical agents to remedial purposes, which I have alluded to as probably not unfre- qtiently passing through the minds of medical men when engaged in determining the mode of treatment most suitable to each indi- vidual case presented to them; and I believe it might be found advantageous to carry much further the principle of 'fexpressing symbolically the mental processes through which practical medical conclusions are often arrived at. It must, however, be kept in mind, that such expressions are only to be regarded as auxiliaries to the mental operations which they represent; and, although they may be extremely useful in conveying to others the ideas enter- tained by those making use of them, both as regards the arrange- ment of the constituents of the body in healthy and morbid states, and the order of succession of the phenomena that occurs during the progress of diseases and of recovery from them, they are not to be confounded with true mathematical or chemical fonnulcB. As some ideas, very similar to my own upon these and other practical subjects, seem to have occurred, apparently almost simul- taneously, to the author of the review in question, the remarks I have now made seemed to me necessary for the more perfect eluci- dation of the views I have expressed in the text of the Address. Edinburgh, October 1867.