First Lines of Therapeutics as Based on the Modes and the Processes of Healing (Paperback)

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. 1879. Excerpt: ... LECTUKE FOUETEENTH. The proper Sphere of Art in the Cure of disease continued, --but in relation note to the Materia Medica. In some cases the efficacy of Drugs is certain, and their action easily explained; in others, their efficacy is certain, but their mode of action unknown. These are called Specifics. All other drugs are only auxiliary in various ways to the curative powers of Nature. Fallacies attaching to observations on the action of drugs from the concurrent agency of these curative powers. 1. In connection with the proper sphere of Art in the cure of disease, we now come to a part of our subject which is much more difficult to grapple with, than that which occupied us yesterday. It is the relation of Art to Nature, or if you will, to Disease in respect of those agents that we specially call remedies, and the greater number of which have a place in the National Pharmacopoeia. Drugs we call them, or most of them; and it is drugs that I have now in view. 2. It is these weapons of our Art that stand out most prominently in our own view as medical men and in the view also of our patients. Paper, pen, and ink are laid on the table in the sick-room, or the consultingroom for the prescription. Verbal directions for the treatment of the invalid may be all important in their way: and they may be duly appreciated by the patient L2 s and his friends. Eat, in almost all cases, it is taken for granted that drugs of some kind shall be prescribed and taken. And it is on these that the hope of a core is largely built. Is it not so, almost universally, with rich and poor alike? A first visit without a prescription, in a case that to the patient or his friends seems at all serious, would be looked upon as money thrown away. The late Sir John Forbes, who had great, ..