Aug 16, · medical essays by oliver wendell holmes contents. preface. a second preface. preface to the new edition. homoeopathy and its kindred delusions. the contagiousness of puerperal fever. currents and counter-currents in medical science. border lines of knowledge in some provinces of medical science Oliver Wendell Holmes: Poetry essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Oliver Wendell Holmes: Poetry. The Use of Nature and Emotion in Romantic Literature: Readings from Lowell, Holmes, and Irving Feb 03, · In his essay, Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions, Holmes demonstrated the futility and danger of some existing medical treatments. For example, in The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever
Medical Essays, by Oliver Wendell Holmes
CURRENTS AND COUNTER-CURRENTS IN MEDICAL SCIENCE, oliver wendell holmes essays. BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE IN SOME Oliver wendell holmes essays OF MEDICAL SCIENCE, oliver wendell holmes essays.
NOTES TO THE ADDRESS ON CURRENTS AND COUNTER CURRENTS IN MEDICAL SCIENCE, oliver wendell holmes essays. The character of the opposition which some of these papers have met with suggests the inference oliver wendell holmes essays they contain really important, but unwelcome truths. Negatives multiplied into each other change their sign and become positives.
Hostile criticisms meeting together are often equivalent to praise, and the square of fault-finding turns out to be the same thing as eulogy. But a writer has rarely so many enemies as it pleases him to believe. Self-love leads us to overrate the numbers of our negative constituency.
The larger portion of my limited circle of readers must be quite indifferent to, oliver wendell holmes essays, if not ignorant of, the adverse opinions which have been expressed or recorded concerning any of these Addresses or Essays now submitted to their own judgment, oliver wendell holmes essays.
It is proper, however, to inform them, that some of the positions maintained in these pages have been unsparingly attacked, with various degrees of ability, scholarship, and good-breeding.
The tone of criticism naturally changes with local conditions in different parts of a country extended like our own, so that it is one of the most convenient gauges of the partial movements in the direction of civilization. It is satisfactory to add, that the views assailed have also been unflinchingly defended by unsought champions, among the ablest of whom it is pleasant to mention, at this moment of political alienation, the Editor of the Charleston Medical Journal.
It succeeded in doing this, and also in being as curiously misunderstood and misrepresented as if it had been a political harangue. This gave it more local notoriety than it might otherwise have attained, so that, as I learn, one ingenious person made oliver wendell holmes essays of its title as an advertisement to a production of his own. The commonest mode of misrepresentation was this: qualified propositions, oliver wendell holmes essays, the whole meaning of which depended on the qualifications, were stripped of these and taken as absolute.
Thus, oliver wendell holmes essays, the attempt to establish a presumption against giving poisons to sick persons was considered as equivalent to condemning the use of these substances. The only oliver wendell holmes essays inference the writer has been able to draw from the greater number of the refutations of his opinions which have been kindly sent him, is that the preliminary education of the Medical Profession is not always what it ought to be.
One concession he is willing to make, oliver wendell holmes essays, whatever sacrifice of pride it may involve. The story of Massasoit, oliver wendell holmes essays, which has furnished a coral, as it were, for some teething critics, when subjected to a powerful logical analysis, though correct in its essentials, proves to have been told with exceptionable breadth of statement, and therefore to resume the metaphor has been slightly rounded off at its edges, so as to be smoother for oliver wendell holmes essays who may wish to bite upon it hereafter.
In other respects the Discourse has hardly been touched. It is only an individual's expression, in his own way, of opinions entertained by hundreds of the Medical Profession in every civilized country, and has nothing in it which on revision the writer sees cause to retract or modify. The superstitions it attacks lie at the very foundation of Homoeopathy, and of almost every form of medical charlatanism. Still the mere routinists and unthinking artisans in most callings dislike whatever shakes the dust out of their traditions, and it may be unreasonable to expect that Medicine will always prove an exception to the rule.
One half the opposition which the numerical system of Louis has met with, as applied oliver wendell holmes essays the results of treatment, has been owing to the fact that it showed the movements of disease to be far more independent of the kind of practice pursued than was agreeable to the pride of those whose self-confidence it abated. The statement, that oliver wendell holmes essays are more sparingly used in physicians' families than in most others, admits of a very natural explanation, without putting a harsh construction upon it, which it was not intended to admit.
Outside pressure is less felt in the physician's own household; that is all. If this does not sometimes influence him to give medicine, or what seems to be medicine, when among those who have more confidence in drugging than his own family commonly has, the learned Professor Dunglison is hereby requested to apologize for his definition of the word Placebo, or to expunge it from his Medical Dictionary. One thing is certain. A loud outcry on a slight touch reveals the weak spot in a profession, as well as in a patient.
It is a doubtful policy to oppose the freest speech in those of our own number who are trying to show us where they honestly believe our weakness lies. Vast as are the advances of our Science and Art, may it not possibly prove on examination that we retain other old barbarisms beside the use of the astrological sign of Jupiter, with which we endeavor to insure good luck to our prescriptions?
Is it the act of a oliver wendell holmes essays or a foe to try to point them out to our brethren when asked to address them, and is the speaker to subdue the constitutional habit of his style to a given standard, under penalty of giving offence to a grave assembly? A foolish story reached his ears that he was attempting to buy up stray copies for the sake of suppressing it.
This edition was in the press at that oliver wendell holmes essays time. Many of the arguments contained in the Lectures have lost whatever novelty they may have possessed, oliver wendell holmes essays. All its predictions have been submitted to the formidable test of time.
They appear to have stood it, so far, about as well as most uninspired prophecies; indeed, some of them require much less accommodation than certain grave commentators employ in their readings of the ancient Prophets. If some statistics recently published are correct, Homoeopathy has made very slow progress in Europe, oliver wendell holmes essays.
In all England, as it appears, there are hardly a fifth more Homoeopathic practitioners than there are students attending Lectures at the Massachusetts Medical College at the present time. In America it has undoubtedly proved more popular and lucrative, yet how loose a hold it has on the public confidence is shown by the fact that, when a specially valued life, which has been played with by one of its agents, is seriously threatened, the first thing we expect to hear is that a regular practitioner is by the patient's bed, and the Homoeopathic counsellor overruled or discarded.
Again, how many of the ardent and capricious persons who embraced Homoeopathy have run the whole round of pretentious novelties;—have been boarded at water-cure establishments, closeted with uterine and other specialists, and finally wandered over seas to put themselves in charge of foreign celebrities, who dosed them as lustily as they were ever dosed before they took to globules!
It will surprise many to learn to what a shadow of a shade Homoeopathy has dwindled in the hands of many of its noted practitioners. The itch-doctrine is treated with contempt. Infinitesimal doses are replaced by full ones whenever the fancy-practitioner chooses. Good Homoeopathic reasons can be found for employing anything that anybody wants to employ. Homoeopathy is now merely a name, an unproved theory, and a box of pellets pretending to be specifics, which, as all of us know, fail ignominiously in those cases where we would thankfully sacrifice all our prejudices and give the world to have them true to their promises.
Homoeopathy has not died out so rapidly as Tractoration. Perhaps it was well that it should not, for it has taught us a lesson of the healing faculty of Nature which was needed, and for which many of us have made proper acknowledgments. But it probably does more harm than good to medical science at the present time, by keeping up the delusion of treating everything by specifics,—the old barbarous notion that sick people should feed oliver wendell holmes essays poisons [Lachesis, arrow-poison, obtained from a serpent Pulte.
Crotalus horridus, rattlesnake's venom Neidhard. The less dangerous Pediculus capitis is the favorite remedy of Dr. The infinitesimal globules have not become a curiosity as yet, like Perkins's Tractors. But time is a very elastic element in Geology and Oliver wendell holmes essays. It might be fitting to add a few words with regard to the Essay on the Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever. But the whole question I consider to be now transferred from the domain of medical inquiry to the consideration of Life Insurance agencies and Grand Juries, oliver wendell holmes essays.
For the justification of this somewhat sharply accented language I must refer the reader to the paper itself for details which I regret to have been forced to place on permanent record. These Lectures and Essays are arranged in the order corresponding to the date of their delivery or publication.
They must, of course, be read with oliver wendell holmes essays constant reference to these dates, by such as care to read them. I have not attempted to modernize their aspect or character in presenting them, in this somewhat altered connection, to the public.
I had some intention of including with these papers an Essay on Intermittent Fever in New England, which received one of the Boylston prizes inand was published in the following year, oliver wendell holmes essays. But as this was upon a subject of local interest, chiefly, and would have taken up a good deal of room, I thought it best to leave it out, trusting that the stray copies to be met with in musty book-shops would sufficiently supply the not very extensive or urgent demand for a paper almost half a century old.
Some of these papers created a little stir when they first fell from the press into the pool of public consciousness.
They will slide in very quietly now in this new edition, and find out for themselves whether the waters are those of Lethe, or whether they are to live for a time as not wholly unvalued reminiscences. These Essays are old enough now to go alone without staff or crutch in the shape of Prefaces.
A very few words may be a convenience to the reader who takes up the book and wishes to know what he is likely to find in it.
Homoeopathy has proved lucrative, and so long as it continues to be so will surely exist,—as surely as astrology, palmistry, and other methods of getting a living out of the weakness and credulity of mankind and womankind. Though it has no pretensions to be considered as belonging among the sciences, it may be looked upon by a scientific man as a curious object of study among the vagaries of the human mind.
Its influence for good or the contrary may be made a matter of calm investigation. I have studied it in the Essay before the reader, under the aspect of an extravagant and purely imaginative creation of its founder. Since that first essay was written, nearly half a century ago, we have all had a chance to witness its practical working. Two opposite inferences may be drawn from its doctrines and practice.
The first is that which is accepted by its disciples. The opposite conclusion is drawn by a much larger number of persons. has shown that the dealers in this preposterous system of pseudo-therapeutics have cooperated with the wiser class of practitioners in breaking up the system of over-dosing and over-drugging which has been one of the standing reproaches of medical practice. It would not be surprising if its whole ground should be taken possession of by these new claimants with their flattering appeals to the imaginative class of persons open to such attacks.
Similia similabus may prove fatally true for once, oliver wendell holmes essays, if Homoeopathy is killed out by its new-born rivals. It takes a very moderate amount of erudition to unearth a charlatan like the supposed father of the infinitesimal dosing system.
The real inventor of that specious trickery was an Irishman by the name of Butler. My attack on over-drugging brought out some hostile comments and treatment.
Thirty years ago I expressed myself with more vivacity than I should show if I were writing on the same subjects today. Some of my more lively remarks called out very sharp animadversion. The sentence was misquoted, quoted without its qualifying conditions, and frightened some of my worthy professional brethren as much as if I had told them to throw all physic to the dogs.
But for the epigrammatic sting the sentiment would have been unnoticed as a harmless overstatement at the very worst. Since this lecture was delivered a great and, as I think, beneficial change has taken place in the practice of medicine.
When a half-starving medical man felt that he must give his patient draught and boluses for which he could charge him, he was in a pitiable position and too likely to persuade himself that his drugs were useful to his patient because they were profitable to him. This practice has prevailed a good deal in America, and was doubtless the source in some measure of the errors I combated.
The case has long been decided in favor of the views I advocated, but, at the time when Oliver wendell holmes essays wrote two of the most celebrated professors of Obstetrics in this country opposed my conclusions with all the weight of their experience and position. This paper was written in a great heat and with passionate indignation. If I touched it at all I might trim its rhetorical exuberance, but I prefer to leave it all its original strength of expression.
I could not, if I had tried, have disguised the feelings with which I regarded the attempt oliver wendell holmes essays put out of sight the frightful facts which I brought forward and the necessary conclusions to which they led.
Of course the whole matter has been looked at in a new point of view since the microbe as a vehicle of contagion has been brought into light, and explained the mechanism of that which was plain enough as a fact to all who were not blind or who did not shut their eyes. The main object of the first oliver wendell holmes essays these Lectures is to show, by abundant oliver wendell holmes essays, that such statements, made by persons unacquainted with the fluctuations of disease and the fallacies of observation, are to be considered in general as of little or no value in establishing the truth of a medical doctrine or the utility of a method of practice.
But it always does very oliver wendell holmes essays harm to the community to encourage ignorance, error, or deception in a profession which deals with the life and health of our fellow-creatures. Whether or not those who countenance Homoeopathy are guilty of this injustice towards others, the second of these Lectures may afford them some means of determining. To deny that good effects may happen from the observance of diet and regimen when prescribed by Homoeopathists as well as by others, would be very unfair to them.
But to suppose that men with minds so constituted as to accept such statements and embrace such doctrines as make up the so-called science of Homoeopathy are more competent than others to regulate the circumstances which influence the human body in health and disease, would be judging very harshly the average capacity of ordinary practitioners. To deny that some patients may have been actually benefited through the influence exerted upon their imaginations, would be to refuse to Homoeopathy what all are willing to concede to every one of those numerous modes of practice known to all intelligent persons by an opprobrious title.
So long as the body is affected through the mind, no audacious device, even of the most manifestly dishonest character, can fail of producing occasional good to those who yield it an implicit or even a partial faith. The argument founded on this occasional good would be as applicable in justifying the counterfeiter and giving circulation to his base coin, on the ground that a spurious dollar had often relieved a poor man's necessities, oliver wendell holmes essays.
Legal Realism - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
, time: 6:39Oliver Wendell Holmes on The Common Law – Essay Paper
Free Oliver Wendell Holmes Essay Sample. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was born on March 8, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, Oliver W. Holmes, Sr., was a famous physician and writer, well known within and outside the state. Holmes Sr., a professor of medicine at the prestigious Harvard University, also wrote novels, poems and many humorous essays Oct 06, · Part 1. Oliver Wendell Holmes on The Common Law. In his classic book “The Common Law” (published in ), the great legal thinker Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (pictured below, bottom left) famously wrote: “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.”What do you think Holmes meant by this? Feb 03, · In his essay, Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions, Holmes demonstrated the futility and danger of some existing medical treatments. For example, in The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever
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