Letter addressed to the Right Honourable the Lord Provost, magistrates, and town-council of Edinburgh, regarding the Institutions of Medicine / by Peter Reid.

Date:
1821
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Letter addressed to the Right Honourable the Lord Provost, magistrates, and town-council of Edinburgh, regarding the Institutions of Medicine / by Peter Reid. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    rung of late years, till the pillars of orthodoxy began to shake, and old divines, and grave men of business, found themselves lost in the meta- physical'quibbles of school-boys, are no where traced with so much difficulty as in medicine. There, they are modified by a thousand circum- stances so minute, and so perpetually varying, as often to elude the sagacity of the most penetrat- ing. Hence one man’s experience is at eter- nal variance with the experience of another, and fashionable drugs, and fashionable doctors, change with the moon: hence every man has his favourite pill and potion, which ever and anon obey his whistle, though they wontdisten to the call of any other person. Although medicine has principles which give it the stamp of a liberal science, although it opens a wide field for intellectual exertion, and requires a range of knowledge sufficiently va- ried and extensive, yet so much nonsense has in all ages been mixed up with its truths, that at last the Theory of Medicine has actually, a- mongst practical men, become a bye-word, which is scarcely ever uttered without a sneer ; and to theorize, is supposed to imply a juvenile propensity to crude speculation, which a little experience will correct, or to betray a head furnished with scholastic jargon, at the expense of common sense, and sadly at variance with any capacity for accurate observation or sound thinking; so that you would really think they