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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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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    of a science. It is the general assent of the learned to these views, that has given the Baconian and Newtonian philoso- phies their hold on the reasonings of men. We have come to feel and know that it is safe to assume, that what is true of a vast numbers of individuals of a class, is true of the class ; and hence the inductive method of Bacon, and still more Newton, applying the relations of cause and effect to natural science has shown us, that deductions from these natural relations, as determined by repeated observations, are safe as foundations, and yield logical results. With such reflected light, it is not difficult to recognize medicine as a science with fixed and de- termined laws. We call Theology a science, not because it is finished and has no mysteries, but because with Faith as the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen, it reasons correctly of God and of. man in his relations to him. We call Law a science, because it has principles founded on eternal equity ; and though often pettifoggers go quibbling with it, and make it dispense injustice, it loses not its high behest. So we call Medicine a science, because it too has fundamental principles, and arrives at its conclusion by evi- dence derived from nature, experience and observation. We cannot select a single organ of the body in reference to which enough is not known to entitle the study thereof to the name of science, because of the specific laws which relate to it. Wef know from absolute investigation of organ and function, what kind of food is suited to the human organism, why pure air is necessary for the lungs, and what pure air is ; why heart and brain must suffer from causes that disturb the equilibrium of circulation ; why impression made upon the skin by sudden alternations of temperature must effect the inner man, and so of multitudes of facts of which these arc but the passing illustra- tion. Pathology too, as well as health, has its appreciable laws. Our profession includes within its pale a knowledge of the antecedents and sequela? of disease, its cause, its cure, its effects. We know that as a rule, its anajsthetics and sedatives will control pain, and that other remedies are in certain definite and specified cases curative, and can rely upon them just as