Medicine and society.

  • Yeo, I. Burney (Isaac Burney), 1835-1914.
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medicine and society. 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.

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    102G doctor yourself: what does he do for you ?' ' Sire,' rejjlied Moli^re, ' we chat together ... he orders me some medicines ... I do not take them, and I get well!' Sydenham, who studied medicine, not only at Oxford, but also at MontpelHer, then one of the most frequented of the medical faculties of Europe, must have seen something of these men and their methods, and, with that remarkable practical sagacity which was one of his main attributes, he could not have failed to have discovered the uselessness, and even the harmfulness, of much of the formal scholastic medical doctrines of that time, and he would naturally come to the con- clusion that it was better to study human nature for oneself rather than waste time over the dogmatic formulas of the schools. ' Eead Don Quixote' then, he said, or, in other words,' Study human society.' Things are very different in the present day. The technical teaching of the various sciences that are ancillary to ' the practice of medicine' has now reached a perfection and a precision which was not dreamt of in the time of Sydenham, while dogma has practically been eliminated from modern scientific medicine. It is only the homoeo- pathic sect that still cling to the last remnant of dogmatic medicine. No one, and least of all a physician of the character and mind of Sydenham, would speak slightingly of the technical studies that are now followed in the pursuit of the art of healing ; but it is as true now as it was in the time of Sydenham that no man can hope to become a successful and a great physician who does not add to his technical training an intelligent and keen insight into human nature such as can only be obtained by a constant and close study of man in his social relations. Let me explain that I do not use the word ' society' in the narrow sense in which it is often employed. By ' society' I mean human nature in its social relations and aspects —that intimate social life with which we doctors in our professional character are brought into peculiarly close and interesting association. But the present tendency to extreme specialisation in medicine, it must be admitted, tends to diminish the closeness of this association and to lessen its interest. When a physician has the care of the whole complex organisation of his patient, he feels an interest in his charge altogether different from that experienced by the man who looks after a small portion of it only : his nose, or his liver, or his kid- neys, or his lungs. It is impossible to feel the same kind of interest in such a fractional part of the patient as in the whole man; indeed, one of the great evils of specialism is that the interest of the doctor tends to become centred, in a general sense, in the organ he takes charge of, and not in the individual; and this, I think, is injurious to both. The doctor loses much of the philosophical breadth of view which he gains by constant study of the intimate inter-connection of the or- ganic functions, and the patient cannot obtain that general guidance