Excerpt from The British and Foreign Medical Review, or Quarterly Journal of Practical Medicine and Surgery, Vol. 12: July-October, 1841

We now return to the assertion with which we set out, that medicine considered as a science is most imperfect. Those who are about to enter upon its studies should know this; those who have completed them need scarcely to be reminded of a fact which every day's experience must impress more and more strongly on their minds. Now to what cause or combination of causes are we to attribute the acknowledged imperfection of medicine as a science, and its consequent difficulty as an art? Is that imperfection necessary or accidental? In other words, is it inherent in the subject itself, or does it depend upon want of sufficient materials, want of industry in its cultivators, or on some defect in our methods of investigation? These questions are of sufficient importance to merita detailed examination. The only way to answer them satisfactorily is to compare medicine with other branches of human knowledge, and espe cially with those which have attained to the greatest degree of perfection.

There are certain primary existences and relations, to use the words of Herschel, which we cannot even conceive not to be, such as space, time, number, order, &c. Not only can we not conceive them not to exist, but all men who think about them must have very nearly the same notion concerning them, though they might find some difficulty in giving a satisfactory definition of them. Now the measure of space and time and indeed of quantity and magnitude in general, is number, and number has the same meaning for all mankind, and is the only thing about which difference of opinion is impossible. As, moreover, numbers are alto gether independent of the things counted, and admit of being represented by symbols which are free from the errors of ordinary language, it is obvious that we can reason upon numbers as we can reason upon nothing else. The science of arithmetic, and of algebra (which is merely a more general and powerful arithmetic) being free from the errors of sense on the one hand, and the errors of language on the other, is as far as it goes a perfect science. Geometry too, and the whole circle of what are called the pure mathematics, being sciences of quantity, and therefore, in acertain sense, of number, partake of the absolute certainty of the sciences of arithmetic and algebra. Arithmetic and algebra deal with number without reference to the nature of the things counted, and they are busied in preparing instruments of calculation, as delicate as powerful, for the service of all science. The geometrical sciences resemble arith metic and algebra in treating of relations of matter not less simple than that of number, such as magnitude, distance, and relative position, carefully excluding all reference to the material of which the things measured consist, and applying at every step the instruments of calcula tion furnished by the sciences of number. By this union of the numerical and geometrical sciences, fresh instruments of calculation are prepared ready to be applied to a thousand purposes, whether scientific or'

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