A Discourse Addressed to the Kentucky State Medical Society at Its Annual Meeting: Held in Lebanon, April 18, 1859 (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from A Discourse Addressed to the Kentucky State Medical Society at Its Annual Meeting: Held in Lebanon, April 18, 1859

In the above cautionary remarks of Prof. Bennett, we have the true explanation of the medical infidelity so often referred to and deprecated in certam conservative quarters, as they claim to be, and which is, by the same parties, charged upon the influence of those who are the advocates of a more natu ral and liberal system of therapeutics. The want of faith is not in a wise and intelligent professional care of the sick a care that employs in their behalf, all the various agencies that are known to influence favorably, the restorative efforts of nature but in that exclusive and o ci0us care that relies mainly upon the administration of medicines, and the introduction of special antidotes. To this class of medical infidels, the present speaker has long professed to belong, and he may add, has not been altogether without some experience of the penalties which the orthodox party, as they deem themselves, in church, state, and profession, think it fair to impose as the price of the privilege of independent thought and action. In early professional life he was led to scrutinize more rigorously than many others, the anti dotal relations then taught to exist between diseases and their remedies, and which constituted a part of the medical creed of the times. Every year's persistent attention to the subject, has more and more convinced him that those relations are so im perfectly understood by the most intelligent practitioners, and so misunderstood by others, as to constitute a very uncertain and unsafe basis of practice, and are yet so authoritative as to encourage a reckless and pernicious employment of medicinal agents. Nevertheless, it is equally true that so far from under mining his medical faith, every advancing year of his profes sional life thus employed, has only served to deepen and strengthen his convictions of the unspeakable benefits derived to mankind from legitimate and scientific medicine.

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