New guide to health, or Botanic family physician : containing a complete system of practice, upon a plan entirely new : with a description of the vegetables made use of, and directions for preparing and administering them to cure disease ; to which is added a description of several cases of disease attended by the author, with the mode of treatment and cure / by Samuel Thomson.

Samuel Thomson

Date:: 1835

Credit: New guide to health, or Botanic family physician : containing a complete system of practice, upon a plan entirely new : with a description of the vegetables made use of, and directions for preparing and administering them to cure disease ; to which is added a description of several cases of disease attended by the author, with the mode of treatment and cure / by Samuel Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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quite barren as to the knowledge of their origin and remedy. To the first, but little importance, comparatively speaking, can be attached; the lat- ter is of the highest importance to all classes of people. According to the writings of learned physicians, there are a great variety of fevers, some more, and some less dangerous. But to begin with a definition of the Name. What is a fever? Heat, undoubtedly, though a disturbed operation of it.— But is there in the human frame more than one kind of heat] Yes, says the physician, (strange as it may appear,) there is the pleuretic heat, the slow nervous heat, the putrid heat, the hectic heat, the yellow heat, the spotted or cold heat, the ty- phus or ignorant heat, and many other heats; and sometimes, (calamitous to tell) one poor patient has the most, or the whole of these fevers, and dies at last for the want of heat! Is fever or heat a disease] Hippocrates, the acknowledged father of physicians, maintained that nature is heat; and he was correct. Is nature a disease] Surely it is not. What is commonly called fever, is the effect, and not the cause of dis- ease. It is the struggle of nature to throw off dis- ease. The cold causes obstructions, and fever arises in consequence of those obstructions, to throw them off'. This is universally the case. Remove the cause—the effect will cease. No per- son ever yet died of a fever! for, as death ap- proaches, the patient grows cold, until in death, the last spark of heat is extinguished. This, the learned doctors cannot deny; and, as this is true they ought, in justice, to acknowledge that their whole train of depletive remedies, such as bleed- ing, blistering, physicking, starving, with all their refrigeratives, their opium, mercury, arsenic, an-

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