Report of the Standing Committee on Medical Literature ... presented to the American Medical Association, at its third annual meeting, held in Cincinnati, May, 1850.

Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the Standing Committee on Medical Literature ... presented to the American Medical Association, at its third annual meeting, held in Cincinnati, May, 1850. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    REPORT OF THE The attempt to eradicate quackery must fail now as it has always done. Its very weakness is its strength ; and it is certainly unwise to deal the sturdy blows of science upon a thing which, musliroom- like, springs up in the darkness of human ignorance, and in the rankness of human folly. The deceptive systems which captivate the silly and presumptuous of both sexes do so in exact proportion to their absurdity, and this alone would be reason enough for not appealing to men’s reason against them; but it should not be for- gotten that in every one of them some little grain of truth lies con- cealed, just as every vice contains the distorted image of some virtue, and every false religion some element of the true. This bestows upon them whatever brief and feeble vitality they possess. They have their uses too; for they often illustrate the powers of medicines prescribed as no physician would dare prescribe them, or show how far unassisted nature is able successfully to struggle with disease. These rank weeds of the garden of science, when they have done their permitted mischief and rotted, serve to manure the soil which they have dishonoured, and show that, in the plans of Providence, the vilest things are not without their purpose. The treatise of Dr. John Bell, on Baths and the Watery Regimen, is rather a new work than a new edition of a previous one, devoted in part to the same subject. Its appearance is very opportune at this moment, when so much of mischief and folly is enacted under the auspices of the Hydropathic heresy. The author’s learning and critical acuteness are successfully em- ployed to show the antiquity and the real value of the use of water for the preservation of health and the cure of disease, the first of which objects he rightly holds to be the more important. lie does not confine himself to a consideration of the uses of water, but treats amply, and in a spirit of sound discrimination, of all the methods by which medicinal vapours and fluids may be employed to the ad- vantage of the animal economy. No work in our language contains so large an amount of well-digested information respecting the above subjects, and we have reason to feel proud that such an addi- tion to the permanent literature of the profession should have been made by one of our own citizens. The Universal Formulary, by Dr. Eglesfeld Griffith, is a very useful contribution to the list of works intended to aid practitioners in the art of prescribing. It is more copious than any other com-
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