A discourse on self-limited diseases. Delivered before the Massachusetts Medical Society, at their annual meeting, May 27, 1835 / By Jacob Bigelow.

  • Bigelow, Jacob, 1786-1879.
Date:
1835
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A discourse on self-limited diseases. Delivered before the Massachusetts Medical Society, at their annual meeting, May 27, 1835 / By Jacob Bigelow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    34/58 (page 28)
    Medicine has been rightly called a conjectural art, because in many of its deductions, and especial- ly in those which relate to the cure of diseases, pos- itive evidence is denied to us. We are seldom justified in concluding that our remedies have pro- moted the cure of a disease, until we know, that cases exactly similar in time, place, and circum- stances, have failed to do equally well under the omission of those remedies ; and such eases more- over must exist in sufficient numbers to justify the admission of a general law, on their basis. Noth- ing can be more illogical, than to draw our general conclusions, as we are sometimes too apt to do, from the results of insulated and remarkable cases ; for such cases may be found in support of any ex- travagance in medicine; and if there is any point in which the vulgar differ from the judicious part of the profession, it is in drawing premature and sweeping conclusions, from scanty premises of this kind. Moreover, it is in many cases not less illogi- cal to attribute the removal of diseases, or even of their troublesome symptoms, to the means which have been most recently employed. It is a com- mon error to infer that things which are consecu- tive in the order of time, have necessarily the rela- tion o cause and effect. It often happens that the last remedy used, bears off the credit of having removed an obstruction, or cured a disease, where-