Worthington Hooker

“ He sees them in their unguarded moments, and when sufferings and trials of every variety, from the great calamity down to the most trivial disappointment, are acting upon them as tests, searching and sure. He sees much that glitters before the world become the merest dross in the sick chamber; and he sees too the gold shining bright in the crucible of affliction. He sees human passion in every form and condition; implacable hatred and love stronger than death ”

“ He has just been released from suffering. The recollection of those hours, when thought and feeling and sensation were so confused, and all was dark and dim, is still vivid in his mind. The world, from which he has been thoroughly secluded for a little time, now opens fresh upon him again—a new sun shines upon him, and he looks out upon a new earth. The pure air, as he remembers the stifled breath and the languor of disease, has an invigorating buoyancy that it never had before ”

“ But let me say, that whenever you give countenance to quackery, whether it be in the shape of a secret nostrum, or a fashionable system, you strike a blow at the standard of medical education. You in effect say to the physician, observe, watch, study as much as you will, we esteem all your labor and experience vain. When men of wisdom and influence do thus, as I am sorry to say they often do, it certainly casts contempt upon education, and therefore tends to lower its standard in the profession. ”

“ It is for this reason, that the quackish physician, in common with the open quack, addresses all his appeals to the multitude, and brings all his arts to bear upon the one point of making such false displays as will impress upon their minds the idea that he has uncommon knowledge and skill. He therefore loves their credulous gaze, while he hates the intelligent scrutiny of his brethren. There is no one thing, in which the difference between the empirical and dishonorable physician and the high-minded and truly skilful practitioner is more strongly marked than in this. ”

“ Many a man of fair address, and a good share of cunning, with but a mere smattering of medical knowledge, has dubbed himself a physician, and, adopting Homœopathy, or some other system just then in fashion, has imposed not only upon the ignorant, but the intelligent and learned.
This ought not so to be. The public should, one and all, feel that they are personally interested in upholding a well-educated medical profession. Here is a science which is confessedly difficult above all others, and in which, as you have seen, careless observation is peculiarly liable to error. ”

“ We must apparently throw away much time and effort, and it is only once in a great while that our hearts can be cheered by any obvious good results, or any real gratitude. Benevolence does now and then seem to have a magic wand, with which, almost in a twinkling, she turns scenes of gloom and desolation into those of beauty, and makes even the wilderness to blossom as the rose. But she is generally employed in real drudgery with little immediate prospect of success. She digs and digs patiently, and with the animation of hope. ”

“ I need barely say in concluding my remarks on this consideration, that the momentary good which occasionally results to individual cases from deception, is not to be put in comparison, for one moment, with the vast and permanent evils of a general character, that almost uniformly proceed from a breach of the great law of truth. And there is no warrant to be found for shutting our eyes to these general and remote results, in our earnestness to secure a particular and present good, however precious that good may be—a plain principle, and yet how often it is disregarded. ”

“ Let me not be understood to mean that all the notions and caprices of the sick are to be yielded to as a matter of course. I only object to an useless and injudicious warfare with them. There should always be firmness exercised in the management of the sick, but there should be no struggle with them from mere pride of opinion, or a desire for authority, or from want of a proper charity for their mental weakness. They should never be directly opposed, except it be distinctly and manifestly for their good. ”

“ There is no disease, the history of whose treatment shows so strikingly the uncertainty of medical knowledge and experience as this does. The most opposite and various remedies and modes of treatment have been lauded as successful, in standard medical works, and in medical journals, and multitudes of certain cures have been proclaimed in the newspapers. What is praised by one is condemned by another; and it is the individual experience of every rational and candid practitioner, that a mode of treatment which at one time is attended with marked success at another is wholly unsuccessful. ”

“ Every day we see evidence of the fact that so large a proportion of the medical profession practice deception upon the sick, that the profession, as a whole, has to a greater or less degree the imputation fastened upon it. Indeed patients often, as a matter of course, make the distinction between the obligations to professional veracity, and those of the man, as a man, in his ordinary intercourse; and the physician, who has an established reputation for the strictest veracity everywhere else but in the sick chamber, has there the suspicion of deception put upon him ”

“ One more cause of inaccurate observation remains to be noticed. It is one, however, which, at the present time at least, is so uncommon, that it cannot have any extensive influence. I refer to scepticism. When it does exist, it not only narrows the limits of knowledge, but actually leads to positive error. The sceptic, in his demand for stern, fixed facts, rejects some facts, which are established by evidence that is sufficient to satisfy any mind possessed of candor and common sense; and the rejection of a well-proved fact, being itself an error, must necessarily lead to other errors. ”

“ The medical profession has had too much to do with theories, and modes, and systems. Every prominent theory can be shown to be unsubstantiated by facts, and is therefore valueless. Every mode, or system of practice, however numerous are the facts which are adduced for its support, can be shown to exclude many facts of a valuable character; and being thus exclusive, it must lead to practical error. All these systems therefore should be discarded. A true eclecticism should be introduced into medicine, and it should have relation not to opinions and theories, but to facts only. ”

“ The many sad scenes in which the physician is obliged to mingle must often make him sorrowful, if he has not suffered his feelings and sympathies to be destroyed by a total dereliction of principle. As he watches with earnestness the struggle which occurs in severe cases between life and death for the mastery, and does what he can to give it a favorable issue, how deep is his anxiety, how painful the sense of his responsibility, what balancings of hope and fear does he experience ”

“ Physicians who are called in consultation often have opportunities of defending the reputation of the attending physician from unjust attacks. And if they fail to make the defence when truth demands it, they may be quite as guilty as they would be if they volunteered the attack themselves, for they give to it their sanction; and yet, by doing no positive act, they shield themselves from blame. Lending a listening ear to aspersions upon the reputation of a medical brother, negative as the act is, is under some circumstances more base, and does more harm, than any open and bold attack. ”

“ Assuming, for the moment, that the duties and qualifications of the medical practitioner do not impose upon him a higher degree of responsibility, relative to the spiritual good of his patient, than attaches to every other well-informed Christian, in reference to his neighbor, I may safely assert that the profession of medicine does in no wise release its member from a duty common to all Christians—that of embracing every opportunity to testify their gratitude to the adorable Saviour, and their anxious desire to extend the blessings of redeeming mercy to those who “are ready to perish.” ”

“ It is well that the hope of recovery should occasionally light up in cases which are certain to end fatally, especially when the patient is the subject of protracted chronic disease. It breaks in upon that painful monotony of mind, which is otherwise apt to exist. It is not commonly well for any one, in any point of view, to have the certain expectation of death fastened in the mind week after week and month after month, even if he have all the while a clear view with the eye of faith of a glorious immortality beyond. ”

“ Its influence is constant in all diseases; sometimes plain to be seen, as in the case just mentioned; often entirely concealed from the most careful scrutiny; and sometimes revealing itself slightly, so that the watchful eye of the physician catches mere glimpses of it, like passing shadows gone in a moment. Besides the secret griefs and troubles that often hinder recovery, there are varying states of mind, some of which the patient may be hardly conscious of himself, that modify in a thousand ways the movements of disease, and the action of remedies. ”

“ He loves to see the credulous, whether learned or unlearned, gaze at his wonders, and to hear the loose tongues of gossipers busy in his praise. He aims at a reputation for performing great cures in cases in which others have been said to fail—a reputation which no honorable physician ever has, however eminent he may be, because he does not seek after it. Every quack seeks for it, and acquires it to a greater or less extent. The physician can have it if he will make it his aim, but in doing this he puts himself on a level with the quack in the common field of empiricism. ”

“ It is the spirit of quackery, actuating quite a large proportion of the profession. It is not always manifested in palpable shape, and in acts which can be exposed to the contempt of all honorable men, but it exerts a concealed and yet a constant influence upon the habits of intercourse, prompting to the use of cunning arts in order to deceive the community, exciting an overweening desire for reputation, with an indifference to the grounds upon which it is based, and producing a competition among physicians that rests, to a great extent, if not wholly, upon false issues. ”

“ In the practice of medicine, though there is, as you have seen in my first chapter, much uncertainty, there is a high satisfaction in the very exercise of unravelling its perplexities, and in separating, as it can be done by untiring and careful observation, the certain from the uncertain, the true from the false. And though much is left to nature by the judicious physician, still there is much pleasure in watching her movements, in removing obstacles which oppose her salutary processes, and in assisting her efforts so far as it may be necessary to do so. ”

“ If a man buy a coat of the tailor, or a barrel of flour of the grocer, he has a tangible memento of his obligation; for the coat is seen, and is felt upon his back, and the flour is eaten, and makes its sensible impression on the palate and stomach. But health restored is a thing of air, and the visits of the physician, as they have left no memorial behind them that addresses the senses, are easily forgotten. For the same reason a man will not so easily forget his obligations to his physician if he has amputated a limb for him, as he would if he had attended him through a course of fever. ”

“ When the powers of life are sinking, and the life-giving fluid circulates but feebly in the extremities of the system, and is accumulating in the larger blood vessels and in the heart itself, threatening every moment to stop its faint throbbings, shall he, while he administers the cordial, defeat its effect, by holding up to the eye of his patient the grim visage of death, to oppress the vital forces and curdle the blood in its channels? ”

“ The abuse of theory consists in the obliteration of the distinction between what is known, and what is merely supposed. So long as this distinction is carefully preserved, no harm is done by theory. No man was ever more thorough, in maintaining this line of separation between the known and the supposed, than was Newton. “I shall not mingle conjectures with certainties,” a passage in a letter announcing his great discovery of the compound nature of light, is a maxim which always governed him, and should govern every searcher after truth in every branch of science. ”