The moral aspects of medical life, consisting of the 'Akesios' of Professor K.F.H. Marx / translated from the German, with biographical notices and illustrative remarks, By James Mackness.

  • Marx, K. F. H. (Karl Friedrich Heinrich), 1796-1877.
Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The moral aspects of medical life, consisting of the 'Akesios' of Professor K.F.H. Marx / translated from the German, with biographical notices and illustrative remarks, By James Mackness. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    extracted from them for the c Dictionnaire des Sciences Medicales' will give an idea of them. Deep thought, sound judgment, and vast erudition characterize the whole. The progress of physical science pervaded his subjects, and he applied its laws in a most ingenious manner ; his erudi- tion was displayed, and strikingly so, in his lectures to the College of France, in which he look the opposite view of medicine, and considered the economy of the internal alterations in the system, in which, for the most part, physical laws do not apply. In these lectures he took for his subject the history of experience in medicine from the earliest writers on the subject, commencing his course by an interpretation of the works of Hippocrates. But he did not take this author as a display for his learning, as so many are now in the habit of doing, who know, never- theless, little enough of his works, referring to them as a collection of infallible models to which nothing can be added or taken away; but he saw in them the first at- tempts of genius to reduce to fixed rules a series of facts, which seemed composed only of exceptions, and they ex- cited in his mind the greater admiration, because that, although some errors were found in them, they yet con- tained most just and profound observations, especially when it is considered that these observations were made at that period when the world was totally ignorant of everything that could lead to such knowledge, except a carefid watching of the progress of disease. Through the great knowledge he possessed of the Greek language, and the thorough acquaintance he had with the philosophers and physicians of antiquity, he was enabled to suggest many explanations of obscure passages of the Father of Medicine ; and it is much to be regretted that, neither his own notes, nor those of any of his auditors, have been found sufficiently complete for the publication of this course, or the principal parts of it, in the same way as has been