The Moral Aspects of Medical Life, the 'Akesios' of K.F.H. Marx, Tr., with Notices and Remarks, by J. Mackness

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1846 Excerpt: ... natural; but if it happens amongst princes it is, for the most part, viewed in an odious light. To please every one is impossible, even the purest aims are sometimes imputed to unworthy motives. The physician who, with all his soul, devotes his whole strength to his profession is not secure from heartless animadversions. How changeable is the mind of man, how uncertain the favour of the great, is well known to you from experience, and it is a question whether you still retain your former warm sympathy in the joys and sorrows of this world. REMARKS ON THE LETTER TO R. D. DESGENETTES. Amidst the multiplicity of interesting topics suggested by the Letter to Desgenettes, our attention is at once arrested by the striking example of medical heroism and selfdevotion exhibited by him during the plague at Jaffa. It is indeed on such occasions, when pestilence walks abroad in all its direful horrors, when one citizen flees from another, a neighbour from his neighbour, a relation from his relations, when terror extinguishes each kindlier feeling, and the brother forsakes the brother, the sister the sister, the wife her husband, and at last even the parent his own offspring, leaving them, unpitied and unsoothed, to their fate, it is then, indeed, that the courage and benevolence of the medical man are put to a severe test. He is fully aware of the danger he runs in attending on the sick, --a danger in his case increased by the fatigue and anxiety to which he is subjected. What then is he to do? Abandon the post of duty, like Galen when he fled from Rome; or Hecker's Epidemics of the Middle Ages. Sydenham, when he forsook London during the prevalence of plague? These are rare instances in medical history, and even the talents of those great men do not serve to recon...