Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Introductory Address, Delivered at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York: October 16, 1855
If we are sometimes tempted to think that medicine has, so far, made little progress, it is only because the subject is so complicated and its extent so boundless. The avenues that it opens to us stretch out so far into the future that the space already passed over seems small in comparison. But it is small in comparison only. In every complicated department of human knowledge progress is at first slow and difficult, opposed by obstacles, retarded by unavoidable errors, which must be corrected by subsequent examination. The pioneers of Medicine had no royal road to follow. Their landmarks were few, and easily mistaken. Their route led over intricate passes or through close and tangled thickets. Sometimes they were obliged to cross trembling and insecure morasses and sometimes, withlaborious strokes of the hammer and crowbar. They must force their way through ledges of the solid rock. What wonder is it that they were sometimes misled by false landmarks, and wandered off into impassable wastes, or were misled into devious by-paths, that carried them backward while they thought themselves advancing? Standing now on the eminence to which they have brought us, we can look back and see the windings, and faults, and doublings of their track. But if we had to begin where they begun, and to go over now the same ground, we should commit at least as many errors as they.
Let us not suppose, then, because we are sometimes ob liged to discard as error what was a year ago held as truth, that for that reason all previous labors were fruitless, and we are still beginning at the beginning. That is not the case. These errors were only a part of our previous acquisition. They were the unavoidable mistakes, made in first studying an intricate subject; - and by continued perseverance they are successively sifted out, while that which is absolutely true remains behind, slowly but constantly accumulating.
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