Progress in therapeutics : being the address delivered before the Philadelphia County Medical Society, March 14, 1900 / by Solomon Solis Cohen.

  • Solomon Solis-Cohen
Date:
1900
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Progress in therapeutics : being the address delivered before the Philadelphia County Medical Society, March 14, 1900 / by Solomon Solis Cohen. 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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    long as guesswork constituted the principal portion of physiology and pathology, so long as diagnosis was vague and uncertain, so long em- piricism necessarily dominated therapeutic practice and vague or mis- leading theories were constructed to satisfy the inquiring mind seeking for an explanation or even for a rational hypothetic basis of such prac- tice. Here, perhaps, I must interpolate a word of qualification: I have no wish to follow the fashion of the day in decrying empiricism. In the absence of definite physiologic and pathologic knowledge, the alterna- tives submitted to the intelligent physician were, and always will be, rational empiricism or irrational dogmatism ; and it is to the empiric school of Hippocrates rather than to its dogmatic opponents, that must be ascribed the foundations of scientific medicine. Nor is it to be forgotten that observation at the bedside may be as scientific as observation in the laboratory; or that the result of laboratory experi- ence is as truly empiric, in the large sense, as the result of clinical experience. In the domain of therapeutics the unscientific character of dogmatism cannot be better shown than by reference to that comparatively modern school of dogmatists founded by Hahnemann. The modern graduate of the college in our own city which bears the name of Hahnemann has departed widely from the theory and the practice of the founder of homeopathy; and what I shall say will have no reference to such heretical homeopathists. Hahnemann and his early followers rightly finding much irrationality, perhaps harmfulness, in the theory and practice of their contemporaries, sought for some guiding principle that might be applied in the treatment of all cases of disease, and which would obviate the apparent necessity of resort to the violent purgings, bleedings and blisterings and the nau- seous polypharmacy then in vogue. But Hahnemann fell into an error worse than that of his contemporaries. He abandoned the methods of observation and induction by which, however crudely and imperfectly, physicians were guided ; contemned the study of physiology and pathol- ogy ; repudiated nosologic diagnosis; rejected with terms of opprobrium any belief in the curative powers of nature; and substituted for all these an absolute dogmatism entirely independent of observation, based upon a one-sided metaphysics, and affirming as a chief tenet the sole and universal curative power of drugs. The drugs were to be administered after a certain fashion, and to many this seems the most important feat- ure of his doctrine; but, in reality, faith in the power of drugs and belief in their necessity form, for the philosophical inquirer, the greater member of the paradoxical couplet: paradoxical because in his writings
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