Ourselves, our food, and our physic / [Benjamin Ridge].

  • Ridge, Benjamin
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Ourselves, our food, and our physic / [Benjamin Ridge]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    “ Grentlemen, Medicine is a humbug ; I know it is called a Science. Science, indeed! it is nothing like Science. Doctors are mere empirics when they are not charlatans. We are as ignorant as men can be. Who knows anything in the world about medicines P I must tell you frankly that I know nothing in the world about medicine, and I do not know anybody in the world who does know anything about it. I read the bills advertising the course of lectures at the medical schools : one man teaches anatomy—another pathology—a third, physiology—a fourth, therapeutics and materia medica. What is known about these ? Why, at . the School of Montpelier, they discarded the study of anatomy, and taught nothing but the dispensary, and the doctors there are quite as successful as any others. Who can tell how to cure the head-ache, or the gout, or diseases of the heart ? Nobody! You tell me? doctors cure people, how? Grentlemen, Nature does a good deal; imagination does a good deal; doctors do very little when they don’t do harm! When head physician at the Hotel Dieu, I divided the patients into three classes : with one I followed the dispensary, and gave them the usual medicines, without having the least idea why and wherefore; with another I gave bread pills and coloured water ; and to the third class nothing whatever, though they grumbled because they were not well drugged. All the patients in this class got well, Nature, invariably, came to the rescue ; there was little mortality among those wTho took bread pills and coloured water ; the greatest mortality was amongst those who were carefully drugged according to the dispensary. Now, we have come here to study Nature, and not to spin fine theories—leave them to the Germans, who, for once they are right, are wrong a hundred times, and by their theories they are never sure of knowing assuredly what they do know.” The question may be asked — What has the Clinical Society done to advance the laws of disease and its treat¬ ment during its sixteen years of existence ? What have the thousand meetings of medical societies done, discussing so many papers, and not establishing one great fact?
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