Fallacies of the faculty : with the principles of chrono-thermal medicine / by Samuel Dickson.

  • Dickson, Samuel, 1802-1869.
Date:
1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Fallacies of the faculty : with the principles of chrono-thermal medicine / by Samuel Dickson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    your own words, that they are not very uncommon, why should any case of any disease in that category puzzle a properly educated practitioner? Why indeed? This is the answer. The Schools of Medicine do not teach medicine; they do not teach the remittent nature of disease. Till the schools do that, the practitioner must be in a perpetual state of perplexity in every kind of disorder. To practise medicine scientifically, without that knowledge, is an impossibility; and the want of that knowledge imposes on the practitioner the necessity of a daily succession of he and subterfuge, to screen his ignorance. How came Sir B. Brodie to be wiser than his fellows here ? He owed the discovery, he tells us, to his own more enlarged experience. And what was the practical conclusion to which that discovery led ? This:— The sulphate of quinine, preparations of iron, the citrate of quinine, and iron, may generally be exhibited with advantage. Not one word of thanks to the man who, so far back as 1839, sent him the book that taught the proper treatment of the diseases of his own specialty! He had never read it,—perhaps. We recommend to Sir B. Brodie an advice of Lord Bacon :— Always when thou changest thine opinion or course, profess it plainly, and declare it openly, together with the reasons that move thee to change, and do not steal it Having given the reader specimens of the manner in which Dr. Dickson's discovery has been pilfered by the adulteration dodge, and the more enlarged experience dodge, we come now to the prophecy dodge, or plagiarism by prophecy—after fulfilment! In Sir Henry Holland's Medical Notes and Reflections, a work which has run to three editions—we shall speak e 2