Farrington Ernest

from Ernest Farrington, Clinical Materia Medica, lecture 1
(this is from transcripts of Farrington's day 1 lecture on materia medica, to students at the Hahnemann College of Medicine in Philadelphia, c.1874-75).

TODAY we are to begin our study of Materia Medica. At the outset, it will be necessary to give a rambling review of the subject. Before you begin the study of the details of a science, you must understand the construction of that science or art. Were it not for these underlying laws which string together the Materia Medica into one consistent whole you would have no need for lectures on the subject. The ten volumes of the Encyclopaedia of Materia Medica, issued by Dr. Allen, of New York, contain over nine thousand pages. These do not include clinical symptoms, which would make several thousand more. Then recollect, each physician discovers something new each year, and so a great mass of knowledge is accumulated by a sort of compound multiplication. You can, therefore, well understand why the student might be startled at the idea of attempting to master such a conglomeration. Nor could he master it, were he to attempt to do so by memory alone. Man's mind is composed of more than memory. Memory is the impression made on the mind by a fact. Recollection is another qualification of the mind, which enables one to call up the facts which have been memorized. It is understood that nothing which we take into the memory is ever effaced. It remains there forever. It may be covered with figurative cobwebs and never brought to light, unless the mind is so drilled or so orderly arranged that it may be recalled when occasion requires. The mind should be so drilled and its various faculties so trained that when an external thing occurs similar to an internal fact, i. e., a fact memorized, at once that external thing awakens into recollection the fact or facts bearing on that subject. This is very apt to be so with our feelings, perhaps more naturally than with our intellects, because the latter require more cultivation. Many of us are so strong emotionally that we may call up an emotion without any evident effort of the will or any direction of the understanding. Let me give you an example. A man, on one occasion, was driving along a country road, and ran over a dog and horribly mangled the poor animal. This made him feel very sick. The event was apparently forgotten. Several years later he was driving along the same road, never thinking of the incident, until he came to the spot where the accident happened, when immediately the same sensation of sickness occurred. Then the impression which was made on his mind was recalled, and at once awakened the emotions.

Thus must be the intellectual mind of the man who would master the science of medicine. He must see his patient, and when he sees his patient it awakens in his mind the picture of the remedy. This has been termed instinct, but it is not. To do this he must study persistently.

You see a physician old in years come into a sick-room. At once he says, this patient needs Sulphur. How did he know that? It was not second sight on his part; but through thirty or forty years' experience he had been studying Sulphur, had been forming in his mind images of Sulphur, and living ideas of Sulphur. The moment he sees these in his patient, that moment he recollects Sulphur. If he had not the idea of that remedy in his mind, he could not see it in his patient. Now, I ask of you not to try to jump over these years that must pass between the beginning and the ending of the art of medicine, and do not make yourselves prophets before your time.