A new systematic table of the materia medica : with a preliminary dissertation, historical, critical, and explanatory, on the operation of medicines / [Andrew Ure].

  • Andrew Ure
Date:
1813
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A new systematic table of the materia medica : with a preliminary dissertation, historical, critical, and explanatory, on the operation of medicines / [Andrew Ure]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

    29/100 page 23
    When Cullen began to compare his spasmodic theory, with the general arrangements and operations of medicines, he no longer felt that correspondence between fact and hypothesis, which the phenomena of intermittents had first led him to believe. In this wide field, he could not fail to observe a multitude of objects, winch would not quadrate with his general views. This was accordingly the true touchstone; and by consulting his tabular synopsis of the Materia Medica, we shall learn, that here his confidence in his system of Therapeutics forsook him. His candour and long experience on this occasion, burst the shackles of hypothesis. It may be also observed, that deference to the authority of preceding writers, operated more power- fully on his mind in this particular work, than in his Practice of Physic; since it has led him to abandon his favourite maxim drawn from the school of Hoff- man—that the fluids do not suffer change, except through the medium of a changed action of the so- lids. In fact, his great division of medicines into such as act on the solids, and such as act on the fluids, is an admission of the truth of the Humo- ral Pathology, which it had been the object of his most vigorous writings to controvert. And, again, his subdivision of the first class, into those which ope- rate a change on the simple solids, viewed as inani- mate; corrugating, strengthening, softening, and cor- roding them, according to the laws of dead matter; and into those which affect the vital principle; is, to say the least of it, an absurdity, which no person could have expected from the mind of Cullen. * j ■ v y 'ylNl ] 1 j t £
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