Page images
PDF
EPUB

212919

GLASGOW:

PRINTED BY ROBERT ANDERSON,

22 ANN STREET.

CONTENTS OF VOL. XII. No. 1).

[ocr errors]
[blocks in formation]
[ocr errors][merged small]

LIBRARY

PROCEEDINGS

OF THE

PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF GLASGOW.

SEVENTY-SEVENTH SESSION.

Opening Address-"On State and Preventive Medicine."
ANDREW FERGUS, M.D., President of the Society.

By

[Read before the Society, 5th November, 1879.]

ONCE more, gentlemen, you are assembled to listen to an opening address, and I am sure most of you appreciate my difficulty in finding a suitable subject for this Society. At first I felt inclined to give you a sketch of the rise and progress of the Glasgow Philosophical Society, but I have abandoned this for the present, thinking it would be more appropriate as the address at the opening of the new premises. I then resolved to ask you to bear with me while I make a few remarks on a somewhat professional subject, encouraged to take this course by the fact that former Presidents have addressed you on subjects connected with those branches of science on which they were labouring, and with which they were most familiar. As a large majority of our members do not belong to my profession, I hope I shall be able to make my remarks interesting to all by taking up such subjects, and using such language as all can understand. For some time I have been dipping into the subject of Preventive Medicine, both past and present. I shall bring the former subject under your notice VOL. XII.-No. 1.

A

to-night, and I hope I shall be able to interest all those who labour for the progress and prosperity of their fellow-men. It was long the prevalent and deep-rooted belief in the public mind, both professional and lay, that the office of mediciners (to use an old Scotch term, which included all the members of the healing art), was merely to cure disease, and that their function began and ented with the treatment, and, if possible, the cure of the sick. This led to a twofold evil-1st, It arrested the development of preventive medicine; and, 2nd, it occasioned too great faith in drugs. This evil is more fully developed in the southern part of the island, where the majority of practitioners supply medicines, and have a direct pecuniary interest in the amount their unfortunate patients can be made to swallow. The over-reliance on drugs was illustrated by an old physician, who said that when he began his professional career, he had a hundred remedies for every disease-now, he added, I have scarcely one remedy for a hundred diseases. It is gradually dawning on the present age that medical science can possibly do a little more, and that, in addition to the treatment of disease, something may be done towards its prevention. Hence we have what are supposed to be new departments of medical science-namely, Preventive and State Medicine. I use the word supposed advisedly, because I hold that State medicine, as a very important branch of the medical profession, is not new, but reaches back into times of the most remote antiquity, and was then probably better understood and more thoroughly carried out than any other branch of the healing art. If you will turn to the 13th chapter of Leviticus you will there find a medical officer of health endowed with absolute authority to separate the sick from the healthy, and also to isolate infected persons so completely as to prevent the disease from spreading further. Due provision is made that the isolated patient be inspected from time to time, so that, in case of recovery, or of the disease assuming a non-infective type, he might be set at liberty. No doubt science has made great progress since the time of the Mosaic dispensation, but if we are ever to get quit of Zymotic diseases it will be by adopting the laws of Moses in regard to them-rigorously separating the sick from the healthy. Let us hope the time is not far distant when every medical officer shall be endowed with the same stringent powers as were possessed in the time of Moses-who, we must not forget, in what he did for Israel, acted directly under the Divine authority and guidance, as well as being learned in all the

« PreviousContinue »