A dialogue between a bilious patient and a physician / [James Henry].

James Henry

Date:: 1838

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A dialogue between a bilious patient and a physician / [James Henry]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

14/60 page 10

I have again recourse to the opening medicine, I find that it does not produce the same beneficial effects as before, and I am obliged in consequence either to increase the dose or to change the medicine. I thus succeed in obtaining further relief; but this relief also being but temporary, a new change of medicine, or a stronger dose of the old, becomes necessary ; and so I go on from month to month, and from year to year, almost always ailing and taking medicine, and rarely, if ever, knowing what it is to be quite well for ten days together. Physician. You describe a case which is unfortunately but too common, and of which I have seen but too many sad examples; a case too, for the cure of which almost every medicine in the Materia Medica has been prescribed, and I am sorry to add almost uniformly without success. Patient. With the one hand you raise the cup of hope to my lips, and with the other you dash it to the ground. It is but a few moments since you told me that my case presented a favorable aspect, and that there was every reasonable prospect of a cure; and now you inform me, that cases like mine almost invariably baffle all the powers of medicine. Physician. All the powers of medicine, but not the art of the physician. He possesses means infinitely more powerful than medicine, for the cure of diseases; means which are often successful when medicines totally fail. In the greater number of diseases, the due regulation of the diet and of the general habits of living is of more efficacy than the medicines prescribed. This is particularly the case in bilious disorders, which originating, as bilious disorders almost always do, from erroneous habits of living, are to be corrected not by

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