The water cure in Scotland : five letters from Dunoon, originally published in the "Aberdeen herald," now reprinted / by J.S. Blackie.

  • John Stuart Blackie
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The water cure in Scotland : five letters from Dunoon, originally published in the "Aberdeen herald," now reprinted / by J.S. Blackie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    bperate a perfect cure. The fact of the matter is, Mr. Editor, that in these latter days, heresies of all kinds, physical and me- taphysical, are everywhere so rank and prosperous, that even those who relish them least are afraid to act the orthodox tiger so rabidly as was once fashionable. I am, my dear sir, yours sincerely, T. T. ABERDONENSIS. KiRN-piEE, Dunoon, June 1,1849. No. II. Dear Mr. Editor,—Though there are few subjects more delicate to theorize on than life and disease—-both in their in- ner kernal inscrutable mysteries—and, though old Doctor Gre- gory is reported to have said, in his rough Johnsonian style, that all medical doctrines are stark-staring nonsense, yet a man must, in virtue of his rational nature, be tempted, on all serious occasions, to look into the causes as well as the results of things ; and medicine, notwithstanding the many perplexir ties that entangle it, is, no doubt, to a certain extent, a well- reasoned science, as much as, in some of its branches, it is un- questionably an empirical art. Why arsenic should check the formation of leprous scales on a man's skin, or quinine help one to shake off the ague, or lemon juice cure scurvy, no man knows; and the art of healing exercised in such cases is no science, that is to say, no collection of facts subordinated to a principle, and capable of being reasoned on, but a mere art or trade, founded on chance observation, and leading to no con- clusions beyond the event of the individual case that may hap- pen to be under treatment. But, on the other hand, if a man's brain be inflamed, and you apply a jet of cold water, or a blad- der of ice, to counteract the unnatural development of heat in the cerebral region ; or, if his windpipe be touched with the same excessive sanguineous action (as in bronchitis), and you clap a blister on his chest to draw off the superabundant heat from the internal organ to the external coating of the body j in these, and in a hundred such cases, common sense discerns the principle on which the case proceeds, just as naturally as we understand how a force-pump should put out fire, or a drain cut in one direction cause a drain in another direction, pre- viously well fed, to run dry. Proceeding, therefore, on the as- sumption, warranted by a thousand facts, that every therapeu-
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