Medical logic / by F. Oesterlen, M.D. ; translated and edited by G. Whitley, M.D.

  • Oesterlen, Friedrich, 1812-1877.
Date:
1855
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical logic / by F. Oesterlen, M.D. ; translated and edited by G. Whitley, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    power becomes dependent upon its mightier neighbours. All our so-called auxiliary sciences—anatomy and physiology, as well as chemistry and physics—have thus successively acted upon the ill-joined materials of medical science; so also has it been influenced by the changing systems of philosophy, just as its development happened at the time to be connected with the various discoveries these have made, and the various points they have established. Never has there been a want of heads to apply these detached hints to the purposes of medical science, or a lack of hands to work up these scattered crumbs falling from the master's table; only it has proved that the elevation so gained has, at the same time, aflForded a standing-point from which to view the desert that surrounds our improved edifice. And, instead of setting about the diligent cultivation of this waste, we have too often become bewildered and blinded by the sirocco of crude hypotheses and arbitrary a 'priori attempts at explanation which was unceasingly wafted across it. We found ourselves able, perhaps, to cast various things into the new form, but their kernel, their intrinsic value, remained the same. Yet we have seen many physicians attach weight to the opinions of men of general scientific enlightenment, who have at the same time, held no position in regard to their medical attain- ments. We have allowed the auxiliary sciences to play the dictator over us in succession, instead of endeavouring ourselves to solve our own problems after the methods they have sug- gested. We have expected to arrive by their aid at knowledge which can never be attained except through our own exertions; and with this are connected an over-estimation of novel acqui- sitions, and that fallacious semblance of positivism or exactness which has crept into medicine in the train of microscopico- anatomical and chemical methods of investigation. Instead of inciting the physician to scientifically circumspect and sober investigation in his own department, they have rather tended to lull him into a fresh kind of delusion, and to entice him into hazardous hypotheses and theories without ground and founda- tion. He who perhaps understands pretty well how to explain the appearances in a post-mortem dissection, and to auscultate and percuss the chest of a patient, has often thereby become an authority in medicine—the celebrity of the day; and so it has been with many microscopists and chemists, who, perhaps.