Peter Mere Latham Quotes

53 Sourced Quotes

It is no easy task to pick one's way from truth to truth through besetting errors.

Peter Mere Latham
Beware of language, for it is often a great cheat.

Peter Mere Latham
Perfect health, like perfect beauty, is a rare thing; and so, it seems, is perfect disease.

Peter Mere Latham
Unfortunately, where there is no experiment of exact science to settle the matter, it takes as much time and trouble to pull down a falsehood as to build up a truth.

Peter Mere Latham
Truth in all its kinds is most difficult to win; and truth in medicine is the most difficult of all.

Peter Mere Latham
We should always presume the disease to be curable, until its own nature prove it otherwise.

Peter Mere Latham
It would be a great thing to understand pain in all its meanings.

Peter Mere Latham
The practice of physic is jostled by quacks on the one side, and by science on the other.

Peter Mere Latham
People in general have no notion of the sort and amount of evidence often needed to prove the simplest matter of fact.

Peter Mere Latham
Fortunate, indeed, is the man who takes exactly the right measure of himself, and holds a just balance between what he can acquire and what he can use, be it great or be it small!

Peter Mere Latham
It is the great mystery of life itself which is at the bottom of all the mysterious language we are obliged to employ concerning it.

Peter Mere Latham
Sagacious observers and experimenters have, in these later days, gone nigh to show that there is a chemistry within us which is cooperative with life; that making good its work, it gives to our bodies the materials of their health; and that doing its work faultily, it suffers noxious things to form, which become the elements of their diseases.

Peter Mere Latham
Let no man who is making his entrance into the medical profession henceforth ever neglect chemistry. Chemistry was once thought to be conversant only with the physiology of external nature; but every day is bringing us to look more and more to chemistry to explain the physiology of our own bodies.

Peter Mere Latham
You cannot tax the faculty of observation beyond its common powers and capacities.

Peter Mere Latham
Chemical experiment and clinical observation, leading each other by the hand, proceed together, and arrive at the seminal principal of the disease.

Peter Mere Latham
Without observation of the living body, there can be no pathology. Observation needs certain helps to give it a pathological aim; but these are only subordinate; and it still belongs to observation to concentre all that they are capable of teaching in the real knowledge of disease.

Peter Mere Latham
Of the great cosmogony of medicine there are several departments, and each professor never fails to magnify his own, by counting the cost of time and labour, which you must be prepared to bestow if you wish to make any reasonable progress in it.

Peter Mere Latham
It is safest and best to fill up the gaps of our knowledge from analogy.

Peter Mere Latham
As long as you live, you will be evermore conversant with facts; learning and collecting them, arranging and combining and separating them, tracing their relations, and through them arriving at general principles.

Peter Mere Latham
The very existence of ultimate molecules, or atoms, with the qualities which we so confidently assign to them, is a matter of the purest conjecture; it is entirely a fiction of the mind.

Peter Mere Latham
Knowledge may be an incumbrance as well as a help. Many men know more than they are able to wield. There is a point (I believe) in the acquisition of knowledge (and this point varies infinitely in different individuals), beyond

Peter Mere Latham
There is nothing so captivating as NEW knowledge.

Peter Mere Latham
The different professions have one way of glorifying themselves, which is common to all. It is by setting forth a vast array of preparatory studies, and pretending they are indispensable in order to fit a man for the simple exercise of the practical duties that belong to them.

Peter Mere Latham