Page:A History of the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania.djvu/120

 world, materials for thought were presented to him which were not dreamed of in Cullen’s philosophy.

That Dr. Rush aspired to be the founder of a system of medicine we are informed upon the undoubted authority of his biographer, Dr. Ramsay, who says: “In the autumn of 1789 I visited Dr. Rush, and was received by him in his study. He observed that he was preparing for his next course of lectures in self-defence; that the system of Cullen was tottering; that Dr. John Brown had brought forward some new and luminous principles of medicine, but they were mixed with others which were extravagant; that he saw a gleam of light before him, leading to a more simple and consistent system of medicine than the world had yet seen, and pointed out some of its leading features.”

The system to which reference is made in the preceding statement is that which has been familiarly known as the “Unity of Disease.” With reference to this we may pertinently quote the comments of one who, of late years, has written the Life of Dr. Rush, with the spirit of an ardent admirer, but whose medical intelligence led him to criticize the doctrine of the master. “This wonderful vision may be thus explained. Excitement or Life is a unit, and this can be accurately divided into healthy and morbid only; hence there can be but one disease, that is, morbid excitement. This position involves a huge universality, which very few minds, who have seen diseases, can at all comprehend; nor have we ever been persuaded that Dr. Rush himself had well-defined ideas thereof. We have always thought him most wonderfully entangled in the web of his honest sophistry.”

Attractive and plausible as have been the systems of medical philosophy presented to the world, as generalizations they all partake of the deductive method of investigation, which assumes first principles of too limited a scope to admit