Rational medicine / by R.E. Dudgeon.

  • Robert Ellis Dudgeon
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Rational medicine / by R.E. Dudgeon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    RATIONAL MEDICINE. The great medical reformer of our times, the modern Hippocrates, called the first edition of his work, wherein his reforms were aphoristically enunciated, Organon of Rational Medical Science. But he published the later editions of that work under the title of Organon of the Medical Art, or, a3 Dr. Wesselkoeft will have it. Organon of the Art of Healing. He was evidently of opinion that his first chosen title was unsuitable, and to me it seems that the second title is inappropriate. For his reformation is a refor- mation of therapeutics, i. e. of the treatment of diseases by drugs,* and the medical art does not solely consist of therapeutics, for a doctor’s prescriptions are not all drawn from the Materia Medica. The title Organon of Rational Therapeutics would best express the character of the book, for Hahnemann’s work was essentially an attempt, and as I believe a successful attempt, to establish therapeutics on a rational basis. But, as before said, therapeutics are not the whole of medical science or medical art, and in spite of Hahnemann’s labours all therapeutics cannot yet be said to be rational. A great deal of the empirical and not a little of the conjectural still cleaves to therapeutics, and even those who are convinced of the truth of the great law * I am fully aware that the word therapeutics (from Sepairevu) has etymologi- cally no such limited meaning, but as it is usually employed in the sense of drug-