An oration on the principles of the practice of medicine, delivered before the Medical Society of London, on Saturday, March 8, 1828, on the occasion of the fifty-fifth anniversary / by John Burne ... printed at the request of the society.

  • Burne, John.
Date:
1828
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An oration on the principles of the practice of medicine, delivered before the Medical Society of London, on Saturday, March 8, 1828, on the occasion of the fifty-fifth anniversary / by John Burne ... printed at the request of the society. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    lets for the accumulating impurities; or, she sets up diseased action, as the gout, in parts not essential to life to preserve those which are; and which action so deranges the system, as to oblige a tem¬ porary course of abstinence ; and, thus, a respite is afforded, by which the body is able to throw off part of its impurities, and in part to re-instate itself in health. Disorder and disease being, then, common to all the members of civilized life, and their offspring being, as it were, part of their own bodies, its frame and constitution necessarily partake of the peculiarities of its parents: and, although this offspring may be born free from an absolute state of disease, it is not free from predisposition. And hence, disease is so trasmitted from genera¬ tion to generation and encouraged by the imprudence of every succeeding race, that it is rare to find a single family which is altogether exempt from hereditary taint either of the body or of the mind. All the disordered and diseased actions of the body centre in the nervous and sanguiferous systems: and give rise to certain assemblages of phenomena which constitute fever and inflamma¬ tion: into the consideration of which the limits of this Oration will not permit me to enter. It has been said, in the former part of this Oration, that the mind like the body is liable to disorder, disease, and lesion: but it is a question, how far this view of the mind should be ad¬ mitted. Or, whether it would not be more philosophical and more consistent with the immaterial nature of the mind, to consider it,