The homoeopathic theory and practice of medicine / by E.E. Marcy.

  • E. E. Marcy
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The homoeopathic theory and practice of medicine / by E.E. Marcy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

    5/652
    PREFACE. The profession of the art and science of renewing and preserving health has, in all periods and in all nations, heen held to be of the highest dignity, for the devotion and bravery necessary in those who adopt it, as well as for its association, as ameliorator, with almost every form of human suffering. In its widest and justest acceptation, it may be said to be the sum of logic, since nearly all knowledge, in metaphysics as well as in physics, is necessary to the thorough understanding and the illustration of its various prin- ciples and phenomena. In an age preeminently distinguished for intellectual as well as for physical activity, the theories of disease and cure have shared the general advancement, and the new doctrines that have obtained, for their elucidation and practical application, demand a new lite- rature. Since the discoveries of the Newton of Medicine, old trea- tises, founded upon erroneous and soon to be obsolete hypotheses, are, for the most part, comparatively valueless, except for purposes of history. Everything is to be reconstructed. Much has indeed been done in Europe and in this country, since the announcement of the true laws of cure, yet so little in proportion to the neces- sity, that no apology will be required for this attempt to occupy one of the chief places of dethroned but still unsilenced Error. At the beginning of a system of Theory and Practice, produced under such circumstances, and for such purposes, it is appropriate to disclose briefly its leading characteristics, and especially the positions it occupies in relation to points which may be considered still unsettled and debateable. The grand proposition, similia similibus curantur, is not only the basis of the homoeopathic me- thod, but. is also, we believe, the hitherto unknown law of the most successful treatment by the allopathists. Whether we advocate the use of high or low attenuations, or believe in the topical and material, or the dynamical and immaterial action of drugs, are