Experimental researches upon tuberculosis and scrofula / by Edwin Wooton.

  • Wooton, Edwin.
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Experimental researches upon tuberculosis and scrofula / by Edwin Wooton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    between some two is so placed as to render the case apparently anachronistic—tluit is, the less learned practitioner is the more successful. I have known a medical student, whose acquaintance with materia medica, therapeutics, and medicine would certainly have failed to pass him at any examining board, treat severe and complicated diseases with far better results than the very men who ■were his teachers at the hospital. Moreover, his prescriptions were original. The whole explanation is—his mind was logical, and he applied logic to the facts set forth in his text-books. In the cases of tuberculosis and scrofula we have, on the one hand, a series of connected ])athological processes; and, on the other, a series of agencies by which these processes are capable of being controlled. If, then, we understand the right relationship to each other of these pathological facts, and can determine when they obtain in the body, we should be able by the use of these agencies to bring about the physiological states constituting health. This is not a mere logical theory, but a fact demonstrable both in the laboratory and at the bedside. For the moment ignoring the facts these researches have revealed, and taking orthodox pathology and therapeutics as they were in l8G4, 1874, or 1884, we are brought face to face with a sufficiency of information theoretically to yield results far more successful than those social and medical history would teach us have been obtained. Whence, then, the failure? Examine any leading orthodox Avork on medicine of the dates given and you will Knd therein valuable prescriptions and directions I for treatment, but without accurate and definite instructions as to tlie particular pathological stages in which they will prove effica- cious. Moreover, when the pathology is dealt with therapeutically, the advice given does not cover the whole of the bodily processes involved. Very frequently the instructions ^ro:sly violate pathological ' indications. Thus it has been taught: If the patient does not progress under the influence of iodine, try inhalations of tar. i Iron has, in some cases, proved beneficial. As to climate, some I do well in a dry, others in a moist atmosphere. A case is reported in the Lancet, of such a date, in which great benefit was obtained from * * *. Dr. So-and-so has had successful results with this or that, &c., &c., ad nauseam. Here the treatment has been altogether worse than empirical, for