INTRODUCTORY LECTURE ON HIPPOPATHOLOGY. 765 
experiment have been employed in the collection of facts, 
they have neither been extensive enough, nor conducted 
with sufficient accuracy, to ensure those results they are so 
well calculated to achieve. Ideas have too often taken the 
place of facts. We have been too apt to content ourselves 
with observing some of the more prominent symptoms of 
diseased action, grouping these according to their prominence 
and relative bearing on each other, without, it may be, 
associating these in their persistency or change with certain 
alterations in structure of particular organs, giving to 
certain assemblages of symptoms, irrespective of natural 
grouping, individual names, often neither the most elegant 
nor exact, with the employment of such remedies as w r e 
might consider most appropriate to counteract these deve¬ 
lopments. 
I am afraid, I say, that having done this, we have been 
too apt to imagine we have done all that was necessary, and 
earned for ourselves the character of correct, painstaking, 
and scientific observers of disease. 
In this field of pathological inquiry there is room and 
work for all. Disease in its varied causes and forms of 
development is ever inviting inquiry and investigation. We 
may all of us be observers, and although I can scarcely 
acquiesce in the opinion entertained by some—that to be an 
observer requires as great a range of faculties as to make a 
speculative thinker, that to note facts is as lofty a range of 
intellect as to conceive thought—still I am of opinion that in 
the science of medicine it is not easy to overestimate the 
importance of correct observation, seeing that it is by pure 
induction, by the observation of individual facts, that we 
rise to these general inferences, which are to us the most 
comprehensive expressions of attainable truth. 
Facts, however, gentlemen, are of themselves of little 
worth until associated with mind, they must be collated ; 
and save as the indices of particular functional or organic 
changes, and the exact relation they bear to these are of 
comparatively trifling practical value in the advancement 
of clinical medicine. 
And as in a study like pathology, where we cannot expect 
that fixed laws or first principles exist from which we may 
reason downwards to the possession of facts, so it is that 
advancement is less connected with the wonderful achieve¬ 
ments of a few individual minds than the result of the 
accumulated labours in observation and experiment of the 
many. And it is well and encouraging that it should be so. 
Great and shining lights are only occasionally, and at long 
