The medical profession, its position and its claims as a science, a business, and an art : an address / delivered by Ezra M. Hunt, M.D. as president of the Medical Society of New Jersey, at its ninety-ninth annual meeting ... January 24th, 1865.

  • Hunt, Ezra Mundy, 1830-1894.
Date:
[1865]
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The medical profession, its position and its claims as a science, a business, and an art : an address / delivered by Ezra M. Hunt, M.D. as president of the Medical Society of New Jersey, at its ninety-ninth annual meeting ... January 24th, 1865. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    Raver on the Kidneys ; Bichet in General Anatomy ; Collins and Ramsbotbam in Practical Midwifery ; and multitudes of other more recent observers in every department of our sci- ence, have given direction and precision to our inquiries. A zeal arose to enrich medicine by facts', and to rely upon that kind of conclusion, of which intelligent examination, careful diagnosis, and an accurate enumeration of the ascertained phenomena of disease, in numerous classified cases, consti- tuted the material substance. The profession came to feel that it must rest its claims as a science upon a careful study of relations of cause and effect, of organ and function, of at- tack and lesion, of disease and remedy, derived, not by any philosophical abstraction, or from results in a limited sphere, but from a numerical comparison of a large number of cases, in which all points should be stated with clinical exactness. Hence, the remark of Sir Henry Holland is fully justified, that the methods of research in medicine at the present time have gained greatly in exactness, and in the just appre- ciation of facts, upon those of any previous period. This, of itself, is a grand progress, even were it only preparatory. But this Tightness of method, and definiteness of system, is full of actual, practical results—a tree full of fruit for the healing of the nations. Diagnosis has become a science by itself, and, with admirable precision, we are often able not only to give name to disease, but to specify its locality, its extent, its stage—in fact, to have its full descriptive vividly before the mind ; and this is what we want, in order to lay right hold of it for treatment. There is glory and progress in the discovery of a little star, not so much because of the momentary result, as because it shows accuracy and zeal in investigation, and adds to the real material of a science ; and so each step in diagnosis is a discovery in the range of our profession which lights up the track of a hopeful destiny. But not in accuracy of diagnosis alone do we note advance. We have evolved therefrom, and from experience added thereto, actual treatment very different from the methods of the past. We study more accurately the relatiou between