A lecture on quack medicines / [Thomas G. Wright].

Thomas Giordani Wright

Date:: 1843

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A lecture on quack medicines / [Thomas G. Wright]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

11/46 page 11

Before proceeding to comment on particular classes of Quack Medicines, it will assist us, to glance at some generally received opinions, or rather popular errors, on which their acceptance and preference with multitudes are founded. A few of the more obvious of these we will now therefore briefly review, in the order in which they natu¬ rally suggest themselves. First : It is believed that bodily illness assumes a certain and stated variety of forms or diseases; and that there are a certain number of remedies “good for ” these particular and definite diseases : and Secondly, another popular error, resulting from the last, is, that the art of prescribing medicine consists in selecting such herbs or me^dicaments as are “good for” the specific disease, which it is the physician’s province to discover: and that the difference in skill between medical practitioners lies, in their having a better or a worse selec¬ tion of medicines good for ” particular diseases, and knowing, by their own experience or that of others, more or less skilfully how to apply them. This doctrine, from which the natural inference is, that experience is everything in the treatment of disease, and science nothing, is one of which traces and modifications may he met with in almost every non-professional grade of society: and it is by no means confined to the present age. It is precisely the doctrine of the Empirics, a sect of Medical Philosophers who flourished about 200 years before the Christian era; and it necessarily led, and would still lead, to such gross quackery in practice, that the name, originally one of learned distinction, has become prover¬ bially synonymous with the terms Quack and Charlatan, in which sense alone it is now understood.

digitised image 1

digitised image 2

digitised image 3