Page:Essentials of the Art of Medicine Stille.djvu/8

8 case, so in our own, it will often be a mark of wisdom to confess ignorance, just as it is too often the sign of an ignorant, pretentious man to profess a knowledge of things he does not understand. Judged by this test, how few scientific physicians could justify their claim to wisdom; for they are addicted to explaining everything, and, unlike Newton, feel so humiliated by admitting their ignorance, that they are apt to offer vague or even impossible or unintelligible explanations rather than confess that they do not know.

The dawn of recorded medical history is distinguished by two contrasting characters—positiveness in the description of diseases, and doubt, reserve, and simplicity in their treatment. Later on, and in proportion as medicine drifted away from the simple and natural Hippocratic standards, to be engulfed in the turbid waters of the Galenical system and the other systems of which it was the prolific parent, the clinical aspects of medicine were hidden by the clouds of theory and system-building. Even at the present day the medical profession has not recovered from the effects of this error, and nothing is more common in medical books and periodicals than to meet with the statement that certain therapeutical measures are "indicated" by the assumed nature of the disease, when it should merely be declared that experience had or had not justified their use. "The natural tendency to reckon words as equivalent to facts, and assertions to demonstrations, always gives (theologians) theorists and (metaphysicians) speculators, an immense advantage over observers" (Nordau, Degeneration, p. 76). It seems to be forgotten that the nature of diseases is often suggested, and even determined, by the action upon them of the remedies employed in their treatment, whether by aggravating their symptoms or moderating them, or by lessening or prolonging the duration of the attack. It is not enough because a disease belongs to the class of inflammations that it should be treated antiphlogistically; nor is it true that the typhoid type always calls for stimulants; nor that narcotics are indispensable when ataxic or nervous phenomena predominate, or even when pain occurs.

In medical as in social science, it is certain that general laws deduced from the nature of things, or even arrived at through inductive reasoning, or any other general logical process, are seldom, if ever, applicable to the solution of questions concerning individuals alone. All generalization of facts, or general propositions resting on facts, and which are denominated laws, are formed by the aggregation of those things in which the facts are similar; but they for that very