Longfellow's "Spanish Student."
In all that Abernethy had hitherto published, it was easy to perceive that, although he was carefully examining the prevailing opinions and practice of the day, he was emphatically one of those independent thinkers who had power to overlay the most established conventionalisms with opinions of his own. Although hitherto his publications had related to particular diseases or accidents which were held as within the ordinary province of the surgeon, he was shadowing forth principles—views which, if they were true, must necessarily have a much wider range of application than to the particular cases which it had been his object to consider. In 1804, he had sufficiently matured his general views to think it right to publish them; and this he did in his book on the "Constitutional Origin of Local Diseases," popularly known as the "My Book," to which he not unfrequently referred his patients for a more detailed account of his views, than he could find time to give in the consulting room. When we reflect that diseases consist entirely of altered conditions in the structure or function of some part of the body, a formal announcement that they must be greatly influenced by the organs on which the whole body depends for its nutrition, seems to have so much the aspect of an obvious truism, that we scarcely know whether most to wonder at so formal an announcement of it having been necessary, or the astonishing number and variety of the reservations with which it has been admitted.
But, strange as this may appear, and although all the facts have been before the eyes of man for ages—nay, though their relations have been more or less felt and acknowledged in cases usually submitted to the physician,—we venture to say that nothing like an attention at all adequate to their importance was obtained for them in the practice of physic, and scarcely any at all in surgery, until the time of Abernethy.
At the present time, a great deal has been done to establish, by the most clear and indisputable demonstration, the practical usefulness and necessity of the principles to which Abernethy conducted us, in the cure of diseases, whether medical or surgical. Still, these principles are much neglected, much misunderstood, or so imperfectly carried out, as to excite, even in many of the public, expressions of astonishment. It is, indeed, not too much to assert, that, even in those cases in which their successful application has been most incontestibly exemplified, his principles are fully carried out on comparatively few occasions.
The causes of all this are, we fear, too easily detected; the removal of them is indeed sufficiently difficult. We may possibly discuss both points in the sequel.
Instead of the exquisite simplicity and clearness of Abernethy's views, so far as he had gone, being carefully studied, and with a view to the extension of them beyond those limits which his time, his opportunities, and his caution had assigned to them; instead of examining into, and testing, the practical value of the deducible, and, in fact, necessary sequences, on views of which he had demonstrated the truth and value; practice appears to have taken a retrograde movement.
He who would advance even as far as Abernethy, is in danger of being regarded as crotchety or peculiar; whilst any who should strive by a more careful examination of his views to render their practical application more definite and analytical, must be prepared to be looked on simply as an enthusiast.
This has, indeed, been the case more or less in all sciences from the earliest times. The facts which conduct us to a true interpretation of the laws in obedience to which they occur, have been always before us; the very same facts on which, as Professor Whewell[29] observes, we have raised the stately structure of modern science. Butler[30] had before made a similar remark. Poets too, as even the motto to our chapter shows, have held the same sentiment; what everybody knows, how few consider! Neither Copernicus nor Galileo altered or invented facts. Those they observed! what they discovered, were conclusions interpreting the true relations of them. Bodies fell to the earth, and the crystal rain-drop had shown the composite nature of light in the beautiful colours and wonderful illustrations of the rainbow, ages before Newton discovered the true explanation of the one, and the great law exemplified in the other.
The object of "the Book" is to set forth the great fact of the reciprocal influence existing between the nervous system and the digestive organs, and the power they mutually exert in the causation and cure of diseases; and this, whether the diseases originate in disturbance primarily directed to the brain or any other portion of the nervous system, or to the digestive organs; whether the result of accident, such as mechanical injury, or other local manifestations more commonly termed disease. In the book before us we shall find an ample refutation of many misconstructions and misapprehensions of Abernethy's views; misconstructions which have tended to obscure principles, remarkable for their simplicity and truthfulness; to impede the beneficial application of them in a manner which has been equally injurious to the public and the profession, and which, have impressed on mankind a very inadequate idea of the obligations due to the distinguished author. His views were said to be theoretical and exaggerated, whilst they were conclusions logically deduced from facts; and so far from the pervading power of the influences to which he proximately attributed the causation and cure of disease having been exaggerated, the onward study of his principles only serves, by the discovery of more multiplied and refined applications of them, to fill in with additional illustrations the accurate outline which he has so truthfully drawn. He never wrests a fact to a conclusion to which it does not legitimately lead. In virtue of that suggestive quality of his mind (so important an aid in philosophical inquiries), he occasionally, in all his writings, puts forth suppositions, but these only as questions, the next in the order of inquiry, and these he asks of nature alone.
Mr. Hunter had been the first in this country to make the true use of anatomy; I mean in the sense that whilst it was no doubt the basis of our investigation into the functions or uses of parts, still it was only one of an extensive series of inquiries. He had examined the dead with no purpose more earnestly, than to assist him in his endeavours to observe the living; examined parts, that he might better understand the whole. He had made himself familiar with the economy of animals, and generally with the habits of organized beings, whether animal or vegetable, that he might know their relations to each other, and that of the whole to the phenomena, habits, and laws, of the Human economy. As he neglected no source whence it had been customary to seek for information, so, notwithstanding his fondness for animals, he made various experiments on living creatures. But whilst these experiments afford additional proofs of the poverty, so to speak, of this plan of investigation, they impress on us the truth of Sir Charles Bell's assertion, that physiology is essentially a science of observation. We have only to place Mr. Hunter's observations and experiments here referred to, in juxtaposition, in order to bring out in high relief the great meaning and value of the one, and the unnecessary, or inconclusive, character of the other. He also examined the various facts presented to him in the living body with unequalled patience and circumspection.