Browning as a scientific poet / by Edward Berdoe.

  • Berdoe, Edward, 1836-1916.
Date:
[1885]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Browning as a scientific poet / by Edward Berdoe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    18/26 (page 16)
    imagery of his fancy, no reader of Browning's Paracelsus needs to be told. It might have been a Sir Charles Bell who wrote the lines on the Human Hand. Browning must have a knowledge of its structure more than skin-deep. Flesli and bone and nerve that make The poorest, coarsest human liand An object worthy to be scanned A whole life long for their sole sake. (James Leo's JVife.) Of the painter who is an anatomist he says— To him the bones their inmost secret yield, Each notch and nodule signify their use ; On him the muscles turn, in triple tier. And pleasantly entreat the entrusted man : ' Familiarize thee with our play that lifts Here, and then lowers again, leg, arm, and foot!' —Ensuring due correctness in the nude. Even the mysterious technicalities of a medical prescription are not hidden from our poet; he knows the principles upon which an intell igent physician proceeds, when he writes one— Ask, now, a doctor for a remedy ! There's his prescription. Bid him point you ont Which of the five or six ingredients saves The sick man. ' Such the efficacity ? Then why not dare and do things in one dose Simple and pure, all virtue, no alloy Of the idle drop and j)owder ?' What's his word ? The etlicacity, neat were neutralised ; It wants dispersing and retarding,—nay. Is put upon its mettle, plays its part Precisely thi'ough such hindrance everywhere. Finds some mysterious give and take i' the case Some gain by oijposition, he foregoes Should he uufetter the medicament. {PHtux E. S., p. 78.) I will not trouble you with explaining how accurate tliia is, but I may say it is a precise statement of the methods that guide the phar- macologist, and affords the poet an admirable illustration of the method of our education and development in a world of contending forces and a pilgrimage of dangers and difficulties that, rightly met, subserve perhaps the highest interests the Great All-Father had in view for us when He placed us in their mid.st. Browning's optimism is in complete accord with the teachings of science. James Hinton, in one of his pregnant sentences, says,