The Doctor in History, Literature, Folk-Lore, Etc.
History
The Doctor in History, Literature, Folk-Lore, Etc.
Literature and medicine; Physicians; Physicians in literature
The wig also constituted an essential part of the dress of the older
physicians. It was a three tailed one, and this with silk stockings,
clothes well trimmed, velvet coat with stiff skirts, large cuffs and
buckled shoes, made quite an imposing show, and when they rode in their
gilt carriages with two running footmen, as was the custom, no one would
be better recognised. It is interesting to contrast the dress and mode of
practice of the modern physician with those who built up the honourable
calling of medicine. It is so easy to laugh at those who practised the art
of medicine before modern scientific investigation had laid naked so many
of the secrets of physiology, pathology, and vital chemistry. Slowly but
surely as the true nature and progress of disease has become known, so
have all the adventitious and unnecessary surroundings of dress
disappeared, and now we may meet the most eminent of our doctors, clad in
the same garments as a man on Change. All this was inevitable, but running
through the whole history of medicine is a magnificent desire on the part
of those who have made a mark, and of all its humbler followers to "go
about doing good." The difficulties are enormous, the labour is colossal,
but there could be no convictions were there no perplexities. Credulity is
the disease of a feeble intellect. Accepting all things and understanding
nothing, kills a man's intellect and checks all scientific investigation.
The physician has to knock at the temple of the human frame, and patiently
pick up the knowledge which nature always gives to those who love her
best. But the investigator must approach his subject with humility, and
with the recognition that there is a limit to the human intellect, and
that behind and above this big round world is a supreme being, that around
the intellect is the atmosphere of spiritual convictions from which our
highest and best impulses spring, that the universe not only embraces
material phenomena, but it also includes the sublime and the moral
attributes, which no man has, or ever will, weigh in the physical balance
or distil from a retort.
The union of Intellect and Piety will grow stronger as the world grows
older. When men began to think, they began to doubt, but when men have
thought more deeply they will cease to doubt.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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