Memorial of the life and work of Charles Morehead ... / edited by Hermann A. Haines.
- Date:
- [1884]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Memorial of the life and work of Charles Morehead ... / edited by Hermann A. Haines. 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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![years of my Indian practice, and that it would be quite as reasonable for European physicians to maintain that my not having witnessed scarlet fever in India was simply an error in diagnosis from having mixed it up with measles, with which I was familiar, as physicians in Europe had done—before Home, some hundred years ago ? Medicine can never progress as a science if we cut the Gordian knot of difficulties by assuming ignorance and incompeteucy in the observers who have preceded us, unless the indications are so manifest as not to be evaded. I entirely agree in the very excellent i-emarks which you make as to the course which ought to be pursued in the future. I do not pretend to have seen the greater number of the Reports which have come from India, as ” “ for these are not accessible to outsiders, but I have seen sufficient to convince me that there is much loose- ness and inaccuracy and want of the close method and precision which clinical observation and record require before they can be received with perfect confidence. In a word, the hobby has become rampant and run away with its riders, which, as you observe, is exactly what I predicted, but it has occurred to an extent I could not have ventured to anticipate. “ One word of doubt. I am not sure that you inter- pret rightly the reference which you make at page 336 of your paper, antecedent to ‘Twining’” [I give a citation from Annesley, which Dr. Lyons holds to be evidence that enteric fever was observed by that authority in India. —N.C.]. “To me the incident seems to resemble what I describe at page 24, ‘ Clinical Researches,’ second edition, beginning at the Mortality, and on the top of page 28 ” [Intermittent complicated with diarrhoea or dysentery.— N.C.], “ much more than anything allied to Enteric, and I am quite sure that these were not Enteric.”](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21937527_0143.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
