Page:The healing art in its historic and prophetic aspects - the Harveian oration delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, Oct. 19, 1885 (IA b21908199).pdf/19

 and many others. To Sydenham, Baglivi, and notably Boerhaave, may be ascribed the merit of applying to medicine the method of observation which may be said to have been dormant since the days of Hippocrates. Morbid anatomy, which first took shape in the hands of Bonetus, and was developed by the labours of Mor- gagni, more than sustained its position by the labours of the Hunters, of our illustrious Fellow, Matthew Baillie, and of many eminent French pathologists. Thus, then, did every branch of our science make progress. Unfor- tunately, however, incidental to this progress, often in- separable from it, and always detrimental to it, there has continued a tendency to system-making and speculating of the shallowest and most specious character. I am not concerned with the causes which occasioned the delusions hence arising, nor with the justification they might plead for their existence in times when superstition and credulity were rife: it is sufficient for my argument that they existed, and that they contributed, not without reason, to the low esteem in which the efforts of even the foremost of our profession were held. But, whilst the true science which budded forth with Hippocrates was stifled by the systems of his successors, its revival with Harvey and his contem- poraries was too powerful to suffer the same fate; hence- forth the vain imaginings ran their course side by side with the progress of scientific truth, frequently to its hin- drance and injury, but still more frequently to be cast aside and forgotten.

The sources of the various superstitions which degraded Sources our science, and which even still afford some ground for and phases scepticism, are to be sought not only in the inherent ten- of super- dency of the human mind to accept the marvellous and supernatural, to court deception, and to be pleased rather than otherwise with the result of its quest- stition.

Quandoquidem populus decipi vult, decipiatur (3)—