The vocation of the medical scholar : being the oration delivered at the eighty-third anniversary of the Medical Society of London / by Benjamin W. Richardson.

  • Richardson, Benjamin Ward, 1828-1896.
Date:
1856
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The vocation of the medical scholar : being the oration delivered at the eighty-third anniversary of the Medical Society of London / by Benjamin W. Richardson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    sect speculating on what the fact may be, the other looking at it barely as a fact in mute astonishment, or dealing at it certain wild blows, which may either be purely at a venture, or, as is most commonly the case, may be made at the dictation of some old speculation, which has long been known to have originated in visions indefinable. With the true Medical Scholar this division of thought and action is unknown. His Vocation is all practical, whatever the world may say and think of him or his works. The speculator thinks there is a kind of midway or exercise ground between absolute ignorance and absolute knowledge in science. The Scholar knows there is nothing substantial of the kind. If he, the Scholar, is asked for an explanation of any given phenomenon, he either says, “ it is so and so, and thus it is so simply proved that you who are asking can prove it for yourselves if you will;” or he honestly says, “the fact is as you see it; there is as yet no explanation; certain guesses have, it is true, been made about it, but these are neither safe nor profitable—they may be right, but they are more possibly wrong.” For his own part, he will rather die unknowing, and feeling the difficulty beyond his reach, than invent mystical fancies, terms, or explanations regarding it, which might perchance mislead for a season, and bring him to ceitain obloquy at last. The Medical Scholar who dares to look Nature in the face, and to speak of her only as he finds her, must bring into play a degree of moral courage and endurance not common to all nor pleasant to many. For it is a remarkable, and, I had almost said, a laugh¬ able fact, that a Scholar of this class is sure, for a time at least, to be doubted, possibly derided. I he speculatois consider him sceptical—the so-called practical doers take him for an innovator or upstart, who is never so happy as when he is grubbing up some pet theory on which their practice is based, or in asking them for unanswerable whys and wherefores regarding their acts and deeds. Should he dare to advance anything new, worked out in his own rigid way, his difficulties are almost insurmountable. 101 it is his business to instruct—not after the hypothesis reading-made- easy system of modifying and shaving down facts to meet and dovetail with opinions—nor yet after the ijpse dixit reading-made- easier principle of the dogmatist—but by the absolute demonstra-