Page:Introductory lecture delivered in the Adelaide Hospital, Dublin, at the commencement of the clinical course, October 31, 1864 (IA b21916433).pdf/11

11 original works in which they have appeared. If practical medicine is to maintain its proper place among the kindred professions, it can only be done by the body at large possessing: some claim to the title of a learned and an educated class; and a man who has no taste for reading, and no personal acquaintance with books, especially those bearing on his own department of general science, can scarcely be looked upon as having any pretension to be regarded in this light. For this reason, then, if there were no other, it is essential that you should become as extensively acquainted as possible with the writings of the most esteemed authors upon the various departments of medicine.

But it would be a mistake to suppose that any one could prepare himself for actual conflict with the realities of the sick room by merely making himself master of all that had been written on the subject. In the first place, if he has never seen any plan of treatment put into practice, how is he to decide between the merits of different, and it may be, opposite plans recommended by different authors? These differences, in many cases, may be satisfactorily explained and reconciled; but to the student, brought into contact with disease for the first time, they must prove hopelessly embarrassing. In the second place, medicine is a progressive science. The history of the last half century establishes this point beyond the possibility of contradiction. The effect of this continual progression is to render works of undoubted merit at the date of their publication, comparatively valueless after the lapse of a few years.

But the great objection is, that books, however well adapted to explain the theory of medicine, are of little practical use in making us acquainted with disease as it occurs in nature. The ordinary symptoms of any morbid state, as described in books, are rarely if ever met with in any individual. They are either modified by special influences originating in the constitution of the patient, or they are combined with other morbid states, which complicate and alter the complexion of the case. It has not unfrequently happened that a student familiar with the name of a disease,