[ 21 ]
of others. They blindly pursue an uncertain tract, in which they must constantly wander, since it is so often obscured, and insufficient to conduct them any great length.
A contracted view of Medicine naturally confines a man to a very narrow circle, and limits him to a few partial indications in the cure of diseases. He soon gets through his little stock of knowledge; he repeats over and over his round of prescriptions, the same almost in every case; and, although he is continually embarrassed, has the vanity to believe that, from the few maxims which he has adopted, he has within himself all the principles of medical knowledge, and that he has exhausted all the resources of art. This is a notion subversive of all improvement. It flatters the imagination of the indolent, as it dispenses with those toilsome labours which are necessary to the production of truth; and chains him down to a dangerous rotine of practice, unworthy the name of art.
The industry of many centuries have already been employed to bring Physic to that degree of perfection at which it is now arrived. It will still require a long time to remove the obscurities which yet veil many parts of it. The application of many, amongst the greatest of men, has hitherto been in-insufficient to clear up all our doubts in medicine. How then can it be supposed that any one, untutored in this art, can by his own natural abilities ever
