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]
Catalogue details

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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    sciences or in literature) infer that they are abundantly com- petent to decide upon this. Now and then a physician who. because he cannot understand everything, concludes he under- stands nothing, by the false logic of doubt falls into the same error ; and even a late President of the Excelsior State So- ciety has announced the doctrine that Medicine, as an art, has never been profited by Medicine as a science. In mind, as in nature, centripetal and centrifugal forces sometimes loose their co-ordinate action; the orbit is disturbed, and great planets be- come little asteroids. History had its Gibbon, as a man, a downfall like that of Rome; philosophy its Voltaire; astron- omy its La Place; and Religion its Colenso; and the fact that now and then a great soul goes overboard from the vessel which moves, even upon unfathomed depths, as on a friendly element, only shows the occasional frailty of reason, in contrast with the substantial basis of truth. If we could submit this whole question to antiquity, and to the confirmed verdict of the ages, we should have no trouble. The ancients saw in man, even as to his body, a condensation of Imman knowledge, and an object for scientific research, such as was presented in no other created thing, and thus made of the yvoavi szavTOv a science by itself. They viewed the human form as the grandest idea of nature, developed it by the skill of the athlete, sculptured it in the choicest of Parian marble, painted it in enduring colors on speaking canvass, and when they found an art whose design was to preserve it, they called it the Science of Physic—not physic in the paltry sense of drugs, but (pvffiS, Nature's grand embodiment, its most meaning text; and amid all the false svstems of medical theory and medical practice, that have gleamed across the galaxy of almost every decade, with Mi- nerva, the goddess of wisdom, as its patron deity, it has pre- served for us that which it fears not to send word along the wires of time is the true science and art of medicine. But this 19th century will not take antiquity at its word. It is a mighty doubter—full of endless questionings. Human thought seeks new channels. There is more excitement and vivacity