Synopsis
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. 1889. Excerpt: ... Dr. Cheyne, Dublin, Physician to the Forces. The benefits which have been supposed from their liberal use in medicine, and especially in those diseases which depend upon mere weakness, have invested these agents with attributes to which they have no claim, and hence we ought not to rest satisfied with the mere acknowledgment of error, but we ought also to make every. retribution in our power for having so long upheld one of the most fatal delusions that ever took possession of the human mind. Sect1on III.--Alcohol As A Med1c1ne. Seeing that alcohol, habitually used, is of the nature of a slow poison working most marvellous changes in the organism tending to its destruction, and seeing that it is not a food--all claims that it is being in the face of all known chemical and physiological principles and the accumulated evidence of experience---the inquiry remains whether it can rank as a medicine, and, if so, to what extent and under what circumstances. I. THE TERM MEDICINE TO BE RESTRICTED. This term applies to both the art and the agents used in combatting disease, and in both senses is too broad and confdsing, widely varying from the beautiful aphorism of Dr. James Rush: ' Exactitude of knowledge is the bright felicity of intellect." 1. Medicine as an Art.--It embraces all shades of the so-called "pathies" or "modes" of practice, up to where mental training and conscience take hold on facts, after which we may adopt the happy definition of Prof. Wallace: "The practice of medicine is the practice of common sense." Truth is truth forever. No matter where found, or how developed, all real facts of diseases and remedies are destined, some time, to be appropriated and become a part and parcel of rational, scientific medicine. Superstitious and assumptions must...
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