Excerpt from Clinical Medicine
Floated in on my desk from circumambient space this pithy sentence: - "The people who are not up on a thing are usually down on it." Then came a report from a medical society wherein a worthy old doctor remarked that he had never used the active principles and did not believe in them.
When men or - rather women - first began to wear clothes there were those who did not believe in them. The desert Arab now looks with contempt on his cousin who has forsaken the tent and dwells within four walls. The man who left the chase for wild animals and herded domestic ones was a degenerate to his fellows; but he agreed with them in his contempt for those who sought to cultivate the soil. Europe described America as one enormous counter at which stood our fathers with goods to sell; but her princes marry the merchants" daughters. The southern planter termed the north a race of base mechanics, and lost for lack of mechanics.
Every advance step in the progress of the race from savagery has been deemed a degenerative one by the conservative who does not feel the impulse to move along. The history of medicine is one unbroken series of illustrations of this principle of human psychology. Why should we expect the present generation to be exceptional in this respect and to act as no previous generation ever did. We don"t. This is not an exceptional age. Mankind alters the cut of garments, sartorial and mental. Man adopts new creeds, he acquires newly discovered facts by the bushel, he expands the limits of his knowledge and his powers in every direction, but at heart he is the same old man who lived in the days of Solomon, and ages before that wise king.
The first sentiment with which a physician, old enough and experienced enough to have settled views of his own, receives a radically different idea, is of repulsion. "I know what I know; and this thing does not harmonize with it. If true, I have been mistaken in some of my most cherished opinions, self-deluded in some of my personal observations. Since the new-fangled stuff does not fit in with my own beliefs it must be wrong." And the man starts as an opponent of the innovation and only yields if by good fortune his examination goes deep enough to disclose coincidences he had not expected, and new facts that reconcile the old with the new.
The sun rises at exactly 6 a. m. this morning for you, but here is a man who says it rises sooner in the valley beyond your eastern horizon. You know better - but just climb the mountain and see if you get a different view from its height.
You do not believe in the active principles and have never used them, but that fact weakens the force of your objection; so why not investigate and try them, and then you can triumphantly silence their advocates by speaking from their own standpoint. That"s the way to settle them - try it.
You are too honest to yourself and too well imbued with veneration for your profession and a sense of duty to your patients to make the trial anything but a strictly fair and impartial one - you deal as honestly with the matter as you would with old solitaire. So you get some of the most generally applicable active principles - aconitine, veratrine, strychnine arsenate, hyoscyamine, gelseminine, cicutine hydrobromide, hyoscine, calx sulphurata, calx iodata, and a bottle of a saline laxative - and you by no means omit the descriptive matter that tells how to apply these potent agencies. You study the books, apply the remedies, and are ready to demolish - the man who does not believe in them.
Fake Operations How Many Are There?
There is one thing that every physician should retain out of the old scholastic system inherited from the temple priest-physicians of Hippocrates" day, and that is the ever-present obligation due to the great and noble profession that has admitted him to brotherhood. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге Clinical Medicine (Classic Reprint)