Ourselves, our food, and our physic / by Benjamin Ridge.

  • Ridge, Benjamin
Date:
1861
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

    78/220 (page 66)
    a glorious truth found out as this has accidentally discovered, namely,, how little real disease there must bo if so little cures it. It is only upon very extended, very general, and very broad principles, that we can judge on what health depends, or what eiTors in the general economy produce disease. We cannot do more with medicine, nor can medicine be said to act in any way more than by general results. A key to its administration seems to be the desideratum of the age; discrimination under certain well-ascertained and broad rides being all that is necessary. Those laws which I have laid down to regulate all these proceedings iviU not bo foimd fiu' from the truth. The public require to be better informed ; and if they find they can get more out of science than chai'latanism, I have no hesitation in saying they will prefer it, and that science must ultimately win, and leave smaller openings for nefarious vocations. CHAPTEE VII. JIEDICAL AND SELF TORTURE. This is done with equal cei'taintj' as success.—Ciiulized men no better than savages.—Self-medication often aggravates disease, as well as the misapplica- tion of external remetlies.—The oven-and-brandy principle.—Hot stimulating linseed-meal jxrultices most pernicioas, and increase the area of infljimmation and self-torture.—Cold concentrates the area of inflammation.—Hot and cold remedies adversely ajjplied.—Cold necessary in all self-generated heats or inflammation, and heat to all sudden blows, bruises, &c.—The reverse is now generally done.—Bathing, healthful to some, ityurions to others.—The idle and slothful class.—Errors in medicine and e.vtenial applications equally committed by professional and non-professional persons. There is little doubt that self-torture is practised under certain delusions to a very gi-eat extent. If I did not con- stantly see prejudice overriding all truth, and usage all philosophy, I would not have ivritten this book. So much evil is added to natm-al affliction by the means used to remedy it, that it often strikes mo mankind seem not to bo satisfied with moderate suffering, so we led by inconceivably cunning