CIIITICAL NOTICES OP NEW PUBLICATIONS. 319 



reiterated during the last two centuries. Experience depends not upon the 

 length of mere animal existence, but is determined, says Bacon, by the man- 

 ner in which one spends his hours. What the public understand by medical 

 experience is furnished (how dearly !) at the expense of many, l^et students, 

 therefore, bear in mind that the healing art can only be correctly acquired 

 from clinical professors and the sick ; and that every thing — even the art of 

 seeing — is difficult in medicine. How many at the bedside see, or think they 

 see, and yet do not perceive ! Fully as many hear, who do not understand." 

 — ^pp. 44 — 45. 



The science of medicine, like every other, has heen impeded in its 

 progress by hasty generalizations from few and ill-observed facts. 

 Till of late, its history has heen that of the conflicts of theories thus 

 formed, energetically thundered forth by the teachers in the school, 

 and adopted, with corresponding enthusiasm, by the student. The 

 only use of observations made at the bedside, was, with some illus- 

 trious exceptions, to seize on such facts as could, with least diffi- 

 culty, be forced into the " Procrustean bed" of a })eculiar theory. 

 The aid of the Baconian philosophy, though not immediately 

 generally adopted in the schools of medicine, yet had an early in- 

 fluence in forming the medical character of some of our best obser- 

 vers. To such early and ardent investigators of nature, we owe the 

 clinical medicine, as a science, when they first taught us to examine 

 the phenomena of disease, and to observe their progress with minds 

 unbiassed by prejudice. 



In a well redacted history, from various and authentic sources, of 

 the rise, progress, present condition, and prospects, of clinical insti- 

 tutions. Dr. Thorburn has given an interesting account of the most 

 eminent medical and surgical cliniques at home and abroad ; and 

 has judiciously pointed out those peculiarities in each worthy of the 

 student's attention. We strongly recommend to perusal those pas- 

 sages in which the mania for operation-hunting is so deservedly de- 

 precated by our author : — 



" To young minds, there would seem to be something very attractive and 

 captivating in the bold and dashing manner in which the great operations in 

 surgery are performed by metropolitan knivesmen. The general education 

 and consequent efficiency of pupils in after life, are seriously marred by the 

 effects arising from the exaggerated ideas of the value of operative medicine, 

 with which very many of them become impressed. The lecture-rooms at 

 the universities and schools of medicine are deserted, or are unseasonably 

 quitted, and the order of systematic study disturbed, on the slightest rumour 

 of there being — ' an operation to-day.' Students, who, from certain habits 

 of thinking and acting, never so much as, perhaps, perambulate the wards, 

 during one out of the three regular visits, make a point of conveying them- 

 selves to the surgical amphitheatre, and, if possible, of there taking up a com- 

 manding position, in the front ranks, on tield days. For some time, afler 

 seeing a calculus extracted and held up to admiration, within forty or fifty 

 seconds after the patient has been bound or tied to the table, the neophyte's 

 attention probably becomes so engrossed with the subject, that, to the neg^ 

 lect of his other studies, nothing is thought of by day, read during the even- 

 ing, or dreamed of at night, but the anatomy, sureery, and the successive 

 steps of the operation lor lithotomy. Moderate reflection, it might be sup- 

 posed, would satisfy even the youngest students, or, at least, the directors ol" 



