A text-book of practical therapeutics : with especial reference to the application of remedial measures to disease and their employment upon a rational basis / by Hobart Amory Hare.

  • Hare, H. A. (Hobart Amory), 1862-1931.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A text-book of practical therapeutics : with especial reference to the application of remedial measures to disease and their employment upon a rational basis / by Hobart Amory Hare. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/790
    The object of this book is to provide the physician or under- graduate student of medicine with a reliable guide in the study of Therapeutics, or the application of remedial measures for the cure of disease. It has been written because, in the belief of the author, most of the text-books on this subject treat of it as if the student were already a skilled physician or experimental pharmacologist. As a consequence, two classes of undergraduate readers exist. One finds that the mixture of science and empiricism is too difficult for him to fathom, and is hopelessly confused; the other simply learns the reme- dies and doses by heart, and gives drugs with little idea as to what they are to do. Further than this, the physician is often at a loss to decide when a remedy is indicated, even though his theoretical know- ledge of the subject be very thorough. Thus, he is told that ammo- nium chloride is a remedy in bronchitis, but the exact stage at which it is to be employed is often not stated; or he knows that digitalis does good in cases of cardiac disease, but fails to recognize the fact that it is only when compensation is lacking that the drug is needed. For this reason Part IV. has been written, not with the object of providing a rigid system for treating disease, but rather for the pur- pose of bringing together the best remedies, and of showing how and why they are given. Rational therapeutics at the present day does not consist in a knowledge of doses and the materia medica, but exists as a complex art in which knowledge and its proper application, based on common- sense principles, go hand in hand. The treatment of symptoms as they arise by the employment of remedies recommended by some eminent authority is a variety of empiricism whose existence has