Sketches from ancient medicine : with an address delivered on 21st May, 1884. / By Lewis Shapter.

  • Shapter, Lewis.
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sketches from ancient medicine : with an address delivered on 21st May, 1884. / By Lewis Shapter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    instruClion taking root may bring fortVi proper and abundant fruit. 3. Instru6lion in Medicine is like the culture of the productions of the earth. For our natural dis- position is, as it were, the soil; the tenets of our teacher are, as it were, the seed; instruction in youth is like the planting of the seed in the ground at the proper season ; the place where the instruction is communicated is like the food imparted to vegetables by the atmosphere; diligent study is like the cultiva- tion of the fields; and it is time which imparts strength to all things and brings them to maturity. 4. Having brought all these requisites to the study of Medicine, and having acquired a true know- ledge of it, we shall thus, in travelling through the cities, be esteemed physicians not only in name but in reality. But inexperience is a bad treasure and a bad fund to those who possess it whether in opinion or reality, being devoid of self reliance and contented- ness, and the nurse both of timidity and audacity. For timidity betrays a want of powers, and audacity a want of skill. There are indeed two things, know- ledge and opinion, of which the one makes its pos- sessor really to know, the other to be ignorant. 5. Those things which are sacred, are to be imparted only to sacred persons ; and it is not lawful to impart them to the profane until they have been initiated in the mysteries of the Science.