An inaugural address on man and medicine : delivered at the opening of the session of the York Medical Society on Oct. 13, 1897 / by J. F. Goodhart.

  • Goodhart, James Frederic, 1845-1916.
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An inaugural address on man and medicine : delivered at the opening of the session of the York Medical Society on Oct. 13, 1897 / by J. F. Goodhart. 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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    measure into the result; but the wish to get well is, I believe, conditioned and inspired by a more active influence than these, and is nothing less than an intense unconscious necessity of living that is implanted in each living thing as it launches into being. I have often sat to enjoy the view on the side of a hill in the neighbourhood of one of the towns of the Riviera, where far down at the bottom of the valley is a small public abattoir, and I have repeatedly noticed that animals, both singly and in flocks, have wended their way to their doom in perfect peace of mind until the very gates of the charnel house were reached. Then suddenly the scene changed and all was commotion : the animals duck and tumble, run here and there, and do all they can to avoid an entrance into the fatal enclosure. Who can doubt that a sure intuition of danger has been stirred, and that unreasoning reason points them clear ? Who has not noticed how instinctively a horse will recognise the near proximity of a corpse of its own order, and how it will snort and plunge to get away from the noxious thing ? It can hardly be supposed that the lower animals have any experience, and therefore fear, of death. They must scent or sight a something that—as the sight of a little blood to many a strong man—makes the heart faint. This living principle, this nervous current, this anima, this soul, starts us on the road of life and keeps us going, and the first breath of the sense of its failure produces the foretaste of death. Ah, these foretastes of death ! They come to some apparently, and very terrible they are. I remember once watching by the bedside of a strong man in the pride of life who had had a sudden haemor- rhage. So far as I could see there was every hope that the danger had passed; yet there remained a restlessness and an anxiety about the patient that I could not explain. But I knew in a few short hours that he had recognised in some unconscious way what I could not, that in his pulsatile existence some link had gone and had brought him the presentiment of dissolution. The silver cord was loosening and produced a sensation that rightly forecast the issue. This is a somewhat unusual case, but there is a larger number of instances where, I believe, a like sensa- tion comes, and although these people never die they appear to suffer an appalling sense of impending annihila- tion. Many a woman—aye, and strong man also—has described, or attempted to, this indescribable feeling, a