Peter Mere Latham Quotes

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Ordinary diseases will sometimes occur under extraordinary circumstances, or in unusual situations; and then we are apt to be thrown out in our diagnosis, as the pilot is in his course upon any unexpected alteration of lights and signals on the coast. He makes false points, and so do we.

Peter Mere Latham
Beware of mistaking the nature of the disease, and then believing that the remedy has cured what in fact never existed.

Peter Mere Latham
Disease is a series of new and extraordinary actions. Each link in the series is essentially to the integrity of the whole. Let one link be fairly broken, and this integrity is spoiled; and there is an end of the disease; and then the constitution is left to resume its old and accustomed actions, which are the actions of health.

Peter Mere Latham
The best physicians have begun by being the physician of the poor.

Peter Mere Latham
There are always two parties of the management of the disease — the physician and the patient.

Peter Mere Latham
We physicians had need be a self-confronting and a self-reproving race; for we must be ready, without fear or favor, to call in question our own Experience and to judge it justly; to confirm it, to repeal it, to reverse it, to set up the new against the old, and again to reinstate the old and give it preponderance over the new.

Peter Mere Latham
You may listen to the chest for ever and be no wiser, if you do not previously know what it is you are to hear. You may beat the chest for ever, and all in vain, unless you know what it is that is capable of rendering it now dull and now resonant.

Peter Mere Latham
Physicians, who have worthily achieved great reputation, become the refuge of the hopeless, and earn for themselves the misfortune of being expected to cure incurable diseases. In William B. Bean

Peter Mere Latham
A small overweight of knowledge is often a sore impediment to the movement of common sense.

Peter Mere Latham
Wherefore then serveth experience, and of what use is it? Its first and best use is for the guidance of him that has it. Its next, and hardly less important use, is that it enables him to judge rightly the experience of others.

Peter Mere Latham
Let cure be looked upon as concerned with the disease as such, and having little or no regard to the individual patient whom it befalls.

Peter Mere Latham
There is nothing that we call the symptom of a disease, which does not contain within itself much more than a mere sign. Heat, pain, redness, swelling, are called the signs of inflammation; but nature does not intend by them barely to intimate that inflammation exists; they are essentially connected with the processes she is carrying on.

Peter Mere Latham
Bear in mind then, that abstractions are not facts; and next bear in mind that opinions are not facts.

Peter Mere Latham
A premature desire to generalize, an eagerness to arrive at conclusions, and a readiness to rest in them, are very common infirmities, and they offer very serious hindrances to the right acquisition of facts.

Peter Mere Latham
Physicians are in a manner often called upon to be wiser than they possibly can be. Disease or imperfection of a vital organ is a fearfully interesting thing to him who suffers it, and he presses to learn all that is known, and often much more than is known about it.

Peter Mere Latham
In medical science, the only materials of our knowledge are those things which are referable to our sensations and perceptions: matters of fact.

Peter Mere Latham
You are never more engaged in studies strictly pathological than when you are busied about the sick in the wards of the hospital...

Peter Mere Latham
Knowledge and wisdom, far from being one, Have oft-times no connection. Knowledge dwells In heads replete with thoughts of other men; Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.

Peter Mere Latham
All facts are not of equal value: some are trivial and accidental, some important and essential to the subject.

Peter Mere Latham
Where reasoning begins, there begins uncertainty; and on this account the highest and the best things in the world are all uncertain...

Peter Mere Latham
Nothing is so difficult to deal with as man's own Experience, how to value it according to amount, what to conclude from it, and how to use it and do good with it.

Peter Mere Latham
I am persuaded that when the physician is called upon to perform great things, even to arrest destructive disease, and to save life, his skill in wielding the implements of his art rests mainly upon the right understanding of simple and single indications, and of the remedies which have power to fulfill them.

Peter Mere Latham
Diseases are not abstractions; they are modes of acting, different from the natural and healthy modes - modes of disorganizing, modes of suffering, and modes of dying; and there must be a living, moving, sentient body for all this.

Peter Mere Latham
But Nature, in all her powers and operations, allows herself to be led, directed, and controlled. And to lead, direct, or control for purposes of good, this is the business of the physician.

Peter Mere Latham
It is by symptoms, and by symptoms only, that we can learn the existence, and seat, and nature, of diseases in the living body, or can direct and methodize their treatment.

Peter Mere Latham
The end of all the thought and labour of physicians is to make experiments with men's lives.

Peter Mere Latham
The knowledge which lies behind is our natural help to that which lies before.

Peter Mere Latham
The diagnosis of disease is often easy, often difficult, and often impossible.

Peter Mere Latham
Faith and knowledge lean largely upon each other in the practice of medicine.

Peter Mere Latham
Poisons and medicine are oftentimes the same substance given with different intents.

Peter Mere Latham