The progress of medicine / by D. Dyce Brown.

  • Brown, D. Dyce.
Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The progress of medicine / by D. Dyce Brown. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    medicine attempts to interfere, she does so with a preference for milder and less perturbative means than were in fashion up till the time of Sir William’s question. And in both these respects there is a reversion to Hippocratic ideas. There is no part of Dr. Begbie’s praise of Hippocrates which is more just than that in which he praises the Father of Medicine for his admirable rules for preparing fomentations for the relief of the pain of pleuritis. Of late years, fomentations and poultices have been deservedly pre¬ ferred, in inflammations of the chest, as in other inflammations, to blisters and other irritating applications.” Let us now see what Dr. Begbie has to tell us of the steps of progress made iji therapeutics since Hippocrates. He commences by saying :— “ It might be a sufficient answer to the query of Sir William Hamilton to signalize the discovery in modern days of vaccina¬ tion, and the introduction of sulphuric ether and chloroform as anaesthetics. These were unknown to Hippocrates, and surely our possession of them indicates at least one step in advance.” Certainly these two discoveries have been an immense boon to mankind, but in thus arguing that those two dis¬ coveries show “ at least one step in advance/5 and that the other points he afterwards names are additional evidences of the same, we think that Dr. Begbie takes up Sir William Hamilton unfairly, and his doing so only shows how weak his reply to the question is. Sir William would, we feel sure, not wish his question to be taken thus literally; and he would have been the last man to deny the immense value of vaccination and of chloroform. What he evidently means is, that therapeutics have made no advance as a science or a system. Other collateral branches, such as anatomy, chemistry, physiology, have been brought to a wonderfully perfect state, and a similar question would never be put by any sane man with regard to them; while in therapeutics the only progress which can be shown is a few isolated discoveries, which have arisen simply from accident, or empirically, and are employed for no other reason than that they are found to be of use in this or that complaint, while, as a science or a system, drug-treatment does not exist in the old-school. We are, however, anticipating, and further remarks on this point will come better afterwards. But,” Dr. Begbie goes on to say, “ we are able to point to the abandonment of many remedies altogether worthless which
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