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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    often found capable of following up comprehensive scientific principles, and of at the same time so applying his results as to make the best practical use of them. It is left (generally speaking) to some men to discover and furnish scientific rules, ideas, and truths, while others have best understood how to apply and render them useful. Our art depends, in a much higher degree than any other, upon those sciences which are con- cerned with the investigation of the living body, and with that of general nature and its processes. And in medicine we can only speak of fixed principles, and of a consciousness of security in our practice, in proportion as those sciences them- selves have attained to established truths. Every artist is com- pelled to aim at a certain result (with us, for instance, the cure of a patient), and seeks by one or other proceeding or interference on his part to produce an eflPect, the success of which entirely depends upon the coinciding of certain conditions and circum- stances. Every physician, therefore, as well as every other artist, should be in possession of an amount of knowledge at least sufficient to make him capable of judging by what pro- ceedings and means he may best be able to accomplish the result he has in view—for instance, the fulfilment of an indi- cation at the bedside, or the cure of a patient. He should be able to assure himself as to the circumstances and properties from which the effects of the remedies and mode of treatment he has adopted have arisen; he must know what has influenced and modified them, or perhaps directly opposed them, and, in the latter case, must strive to ascertain whether such opposition arises in the body he is acting upon, or is worked by the agent he is employing. And it is evident that the principles and rules of his art will only be useful to him in so far as they are based upon an understanding of and accordance with, what has here been stated. But his mere art, as such, will never put him in possession of this knowledge, &c. It is science alone which so instructs him as to the efficiency of his art as to enable him to judge of the means and measures by which he may most safely attain to the ends it is concerned with. Then only would it be the province of his art to furnish him, by the aid of such knowledge, with appropriate and fixed rules for the most complete possible performance of his task. We know, however, that in medicine we have not yet.