Medical politics : being the essay to which was awarded the first Carmichael prize, of £200, by the Council of the Royal College of Surgeons, Ireland, 1873 / by Isaac Ashe.

  • Ashe, Isaac, 1834-1891.
Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical politics : being the essay to which was awarded the first Carmichael prize, of £200, by the Council of the Royal College of Surgeons, Ireland, 1873 / by Isaac Ashe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    7/186
    that the very State itself, to which the services were rendered, was so changing in its essence as to bring the services of Medicine more and more to the front, as compared with those which formerly occupied that position. For the State which saw that the other professions conferred on it higher service than did Medicine, consisted to all intents and purposes of the King and the governing classes only. The Army and Navy were the King’s forces, employed principally in his personal or family quarrels, or in maintaining an ancien regime in accordance with the feudalistic pre- possessions of himself and his ministers. The Church, as constituted by her Divine Founder, was meant to deal with individuals, and their personal relations to the things which are not seen, nor is there any higher or nobler mission; and by many it is nobly discharged; but the priestly caste had added to this sacred function a political one, that, namely, of constituting itself the supporter of Divine right, its own, the King’s, and the nobles’, alike over the bodies and souls of men, to whom it preached passive obedience, and endurance of any tor- tures or outrage that armed and uncontrolled arrogance might choose to inflict in this world, under threats of something worse in the world to come in case of recusancy. The central Courts of justice were com- pletely under the power of the King, and subservient to him; the nobles held the same relation to the local courts; and the sentences of the Star Chamber, the gibbet law of Halifax, and the bloody assizes of Taunton, testified how much regard was paid to