The British Homoeopathic Review (Volume 18) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: EXTRACTS FROM MEDICAL LITERATURE. The following is the conclusion of a leading article in the Brit. Ned. Journal, Oct. 4th, entitled "A Few Words to Students." It is unnecessary to say more of it than that it forms an instructive commentary on the views of such men as could pen the scandalous article entitled " A Dying Faith." The italics are ours: ?" Every man who enters upon the medical profession in this day should feel himself in some sense an apostle of science as well as an apostle of humanity. Many centuries of observation without precise instruments, without accurate physical knowledge, without advanced chemical skill, have left medicine a formless chaos of doubt and uncertainties, swaying backward and forward, through excesses and reactions, in favour of and against bloodletting, mercury, purgation, tonics, alcoholic stimulation, and the like. There are very few drugs, if any, of which we knout the action, more than very roughly and incompletely. There are very few diseases, if any, of which we even know the natural history completely. And there is perhaps not one of which we could say that it would be treated exactly in the same way by a dozen men, if they were all called separately to treat it at the same time and in the same patient. There is, therefore, much to be done; and to take his part in the work, and to be at all worthy of his functions as a healer of men, the student must learn to appreciate and to use all the resources which modern science places at his disposal. He must become an anatomist, a physiologist, a physicist, a chemist, and a skilled clinical observer. He must value above all things a sound and thorough familiarity with the means which are now in use of physical, chemical, and optical investigation of diseases; and he must learn to feel that, e...