The touchstone of medical reform; in three letters, addressed to Sir Robert Harry Inglis, bart / [Joseph Henry Green].

  • Joseph Henry Green
Date:
1841
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The touchstone of medical reform; in three letters, addressed to Sir Robert Harry Inglis, bart / [Joseph Henry Green]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    generation will not ask for further proofs of what I have here advanced. But this is not all. It is not in the nature of the human mind to remain satisfied with the mere record of always imperfect cases, of sight without insight, which must always be imper¬ fect, and will often be erroneous. If the processes of the observing and recording understanding are not organized by the reason ; if they are not contem¬ plated in the light of a law, or in preparation for the discovery of a law, the imagination and the passions will take their place. Ostentatious affidavits and displays of particular cures will become legitimate proofs of the efficacy of medicines, and the methodus medendi; and the charmer and the poisoner will dis¬ play as numerous trophies of successful practice, as numerous a list of strange recoveries from fearful diseases, as the soberest and most sensible dealer in authorised recipes. And the only legitimate test of skill and science will be the answer, which the shrewd empiric made to the physicians of Louis XIV, who had demanded on what qualifications he presumed to prescribe for the king,—“ Your drugs have not cured his Majesty of his complaint, and mine will.” For¬ tunately for his Majesty the nostrum, it appears, was Peruvian Bark. But the same answer, with less pro¬ vocation, and tenfold insolence, has been returned in our own days, where the drugs have been of a less innocent nature, and the results have shown that those who pretend to cure, without knowing, or wish¬ ing to know, whv or how. will likewise kill or muti-
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