What is Medicine?

                                                                                      

Indeed, if we were to offer a hint to the young physician, fresh from the lessons of the schools, and eager to put them at once into active operation, we should say, "Do nothing rashly; be thoroughly sure of your diagnosis before you think of prescribing; be content to do rather too little than too much, determining above all things that if you cannot benefit, assuredly you will not injure your patient, in accordance with the maxim of the great Sydenham* - primum est ut non nocere. And generally: while eager to have the experience of your seniors, and to treat it with deserving respect, learn also from the beginning to rely systematically on yourselves, both as to facts and the deductions to be drawn from them. Keep the inlets to your intelligence always open to truth, come from what quarter it may, without favour or bias. Be as far as possible perfect in your knowledge of the routine of your profession, yet always ready to re-learn your practice from wider and better theory, remembering with Bacon** that 'they be the physicians who, being learned, incline to the traditions of experience; or, being empirics, incline to the methods of learning'"

What might not be hoped from the medicine of the future, it the rising generation were to practise it largely after that method and in that spirit!

This excerpt is from E. W. Lane's short article 'What is Medicine?' which was published through The Medical Press and Circular in 6 January 1875.

Edward Wickstead Lane (1823 - 1889) was a physician hydropath who promoted the concept of hygienic medicine as a new theoretical system in the medical market of the late nineteenth century.
This article distinctly demonstrates his characteristic medical thought which was, in terms of medical philosophy and history, based on strong holism and individualism.
However, during the late Victorian period, British society saw not only the increasing dominance of reductionist medical philosophy, but the society itself was becoming increasingly collectivistic.

Any way, at the end of the article, Lane wrote his advice to young physicians of the time, and this piece of his writing reminds me of the days when I went to the dental college. 

What was I aspiring for at the time?

I am not certain of it because I know that quite often our past memories keep changing their colours and shapes following our desires which wander the sea of oblivion.   

Only my journal that I wrote at the time may answer the question correctly.

The Doctor painted by Luke Fildes (1843 - 1927), a photo taken without permission of Tate Modern, London. The doctor in the picture has nothing to do with Lane. It was completely a coincidence that I'd seen this famous (only for doctors and medical historians) Fildes's painting during the unexpected stay due to the flight cancellation last month.

*: Thomas Sydenham (1624 - 1689) is an English legendary physician of the 17th century.

**: Bacon is the person whom you know (Francis Bacon: 1561 - 1626). This quote is from Bacon's Second Book in Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning (1605), and Lane might have quoted it from the 1851 version edited by B. Montagu.