Pathological facts : respectfully submitted to the Committee of the House of Commons, appointed to enquire as to the means for the prevention of contagious diseases in certain naval and military stations / by David Macloughlin.
- Date:
- [1864]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Pathological facts : respectfully submitted to the Committee of the House of Commons, appointed to enquire as to the means for the prevention of contagious diseases in certain naval and military stations / by David Macloughlin. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![Hennen treated 407 cases without mercury, and iritis appeared only in two. Fricke, in the Hamburg Hospital, treated more than a thousand without it, and had not one case of iritis, and never observed any bone disease during the non-specific treatment of the disease. John Thompson, Liston, Syme, Hughes Bennett, Cooke, and a host of other celebrated names in England, France, and Germany, have repeatedly asserted the same as these authorities, and have one and all proved, not by assertions only, but by extensive comparative experiment, that syphihs, when treated by careful diet, rest, cleanliness, and external applications, is a disease of a very mild character. M. Desruelles, in his account of his treatment of the soldiers at the Val de] Grace Hospital, in Paris, says, ' It is easy to see that the internal treatment is reduced to the greatest simplicity; the external treatment is not more complicated, and for the one as for the other, the help of pharmacy is almost nil.' So strong an attachment, however, do some physicians and surgeons evince for specific treatment, that I verily believe it will require half a century before the administration of a drug, which has caused, according to the above-quoted authors, the miseries of iritis, bone disease, and ulcers of soft parts, will be abandoned, and the constitution allowed, as in the days of Hippocrates, Celsus, and Galen (for I am con- vinced, with M. Ricord and Mr. Travers, that the disease has always existed, although the connection between the primaries and the eruption was not perceived by Celsus, &c.), to struggle with the poison fairly, aided by attention to regimen, diet^ and cleanliness. I conclude, sir, this somewhat lengthy epistle, by a quo- tation from Professor Hughes Bennett, a gentleman who has done more than any, to clear away the empirical from the treatment of disease, and to establish the deductive or true method of therapeutics. ' When we treat syphilis on the](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2195947x_0036.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
