An essay on the remote and proximate causes of phthisis pulmonalis / by Andrew Hamersley.

  • Hamersley, Andrew.
Date:
1825
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An essay on the remote and proximate causes of phthisis pulmonalis / by Andrew Hamersley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    attained in the gradation of intellectual exercises. The cloud of false reasoning and uncertain analogies which for a long while hung over the decisions of medical empirics, is esteem- ed, at this day, as one of the strongest evidences of that chaos which results from insecure reasoning and precarious investi- gations. But in the wide inquiries into the constitution of man, especially when overawed by a gross superstition, such as marked the researches of ancient times, no little pains were necessarily expended in clearing away the rubbish, which was afterwards found to beset the subject j ere the human frame, with its various morbid conditions, could be brought to bear even the faint beam of such philosophy as began to be shed over the remaining darkness. It was long, very long, after the occupations of the physician were severed from those of the priesthood, to which a blind veneration had attached them, that men could endure to seek for, or hope to obtain the requisite permission to examine the bodies of dead sub- jects, in order to acquaint themselves with the most simple arrangements of organic life. Whatever before this period was known of the internal structure of our bodies, was proba- bly gathered from casual observation made by the priest on the altar where his victim was sacrificed to appease an offend- ed deity, or from such slight information as could be obtain- ed by disclosures made in consequence of wounds inflicted on the field of carnage. The former was, perhaps, one of the circumstances which created the alliance between the func- tions of the priest and physician. The dissection of the first human body constituted an era in the progress of medical science, and irregular and ill-con- ducted as we may suppose it to have been, it must, notwith- standing, have afforded new excitements to the cultivators of our profession, and tended to render in some degree certain and fixed, what before was bewildered by a maze of super- stitious doubt and remote analogies. If the expression of a once renowned practitioner be true—ars medica est tota in observationibus*—how gross must have been the observa- tions of those who drew their conclusions from data derived from the most vague and unsatisfactory resources. It is, however, a matter of most pointed exultation to all concerned, that we are destined to live in an age when the atmosphere of science has been long since pierced by the in tellectual rays reflected from the minds of a Newton and a Bacon, and the gloomy clouds of ignorance and superstition * Celsus.