Excerpt from The North American Review, Vol. 117
The long array of titles in medical literature we have thought proper to associate with this article need not excite in the reader any apprehension that he will be called upon to assist in the process of conventional criticism. But we have selected them for the reason that, each and all, they march upon the highest planes of medical thought, and are themselves the very standard-bearers of its advance. Upon their authority we shall rely for the ideas we hope to develop, and it is with their assistance that we propose to sketch in consecutive narration such accepted general principles and such special but essential technicalities as shall constitute in reality an essay upon the thesis of Modern Medicine.
Medical men are charged with a liability to fall into one or the other of two opposite errors. They are charged with either being too content to regard their profession exclusively as an art, and with rather exulting in the assumption of an attitude of pure empiricism, or, on the other hand, there is ascribed to them an ambition to associate medicine with the dazzling but often delusive propositions asserted from time to time with a confidence which rarely accompanies even the best demonstrated facts in science. The truth is, we cannot establish with exactness or logical precision many of the fundamental notions to which medicine, as a profession, owes its very existence. Often we have to depend upon personal conviction alone, reasoning to ourselves from facts which we cannot explain, and acting in emergencies solely upon our rapid estimates of the probable.
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