On some requirements in clinical teaching in Dublin / by William Stokes, M.D.

  • Stokes, William, 1804-1878.
Date:
1871
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On some requirements in clinical teaching in Dublin / by William Stokes, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    to that body of facts, or supposed facts, which have resulted from the employment of methods based on the use of physical investigation for the elucidation of health and disease, by which alone can be obtained or promoted the quality of exactitude in medical knowledge. But it does not, and ought not, to convey the idea that our predecessors were not scientific, or that their results, as tested by their application to the healing art, are to be contemned. In truth, the labours of the so-called scientific schools cannot be held, at least as yet, to be w^orthy of occupying a higher platform than those of their predecessors, so far as the treatment of disease is concerned; and it may be a question whether, during times when physical diagnosis and research were but little resorted to, a greater power, a larger grasp of mind, did not distinguish the physicians of past times from many of those of the present period. It must be remembered that medicine advances in two directions; first, in the observation of those manifest phenomena of disease, whether or not influenced by therapeutic measures, which lie on the surface, and are, as it were, plain to the naked eye; and next of those which lie deeper, and whose existence, nature, and relations to the manifest, require for their elucidation the use of methods based on physical knowledge, by which alone scientific accuracy can be approached or attained. It is in the latter direction that we are deficient. It seems to be quite natural, even perhaps to be desired, that certain schools should excel, or have a greater fame in some directions than others. But in a great school should any of the branches of applied science, —any mode of discovering truth—be conspicuous, by what may be virtually called their absence ? The modern or scientific method may be considered with refer- ence to normal anatomy and physiology on the one hand, and to pathology, including morbid anatomy and therapeutics on the other. It is mainly in reference to the latter subjects that it bears on prac- tical medicine. Now, as it is in this direction that the Irish school has advanced, we may consider the subject as in relation to the improvement of the healing art. It is here that we are behind hand. The studies of structural anatomy, of pure physiology, and of organic chemistry, all-impor- tant as they are, have not as yet given us any great addition to our means of treating disease. But yet, although in these departments so little has been effected by the Irish school, that circumstance