New England Medical Monthly Volume 18, No. 5 (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. 1899 Excerpt: ...is going to supercede every other and his patients, thereupon buy an alarm-clock and take minute granules at unearthly hours of the day and night. The next time I see him, he has gotten over the fence into high potencies or has become enamoured of some fancy method for overcoming some incurable disease. For awhile everything is due to a torpid liver and his patients have got to take chologogues or he'll know the reason why. Then he will suddenly turn over a new leaf and assert that people eat too much and thereupon his poor patients who have done the best they could to keep up with him are forced to go on a diet of fish balls and cold water, no matter whether they are suffering from Bright's disease or sore throat. Well I suppose the enthusiast has his uses and that in the lexicon of youth there still will be no such word as 'fail.' Year after year we parallel our well travelled road with a new one of tentative and experimental therapeutics. I hope our unsuspecting patients are not suffering thereby--yet I have sometimes thought they did," and the doctor made a mental survey of a long row of "year-books," which contained a tabulated report of so many, many things which had been weighed in the balance and found wanting. "But we are forced to read them," he continued, "for nowadays it is important that we should have a complete knowledge of 'the things that aint so'--otherwise some young man will get up in our medical society and dazzle us with assertions which we are unable to refute. One learns after awhile to accept the ipse dixit of no one even though he can prove it and even though he may sit in the seats of the mighty. He must investigate things himself and hold fast to what he has proven. The career of the physician is a ...