Volume 1
The cyclopædia of practical medicine : comprising treatises on the nature and treatment of diseases, materia medica and therapeutics, medical jurisprudence, etc. etc. / edited by John Forbes, Alexander Tweedie, John Conolly.
- Date:
- 1833-1835
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The cyclopædia of practical medicine : comprising treatises on the nature and treatment of diseases, materia medica and therapeutics, medical jurisprudence, etc. etc. / edited by John Forbes, Alexander Tweedie, John Conolly. 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.
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![But whatever merit Hoffmann may have had as a practitioner, his reputation with posterity must principally rest upon his merits as a pathologist. Although, as we have stated above, he considered the fluids to be occasionally the primary seat of disease, yet in most cases he conceives it to originate in an affection of the solids. In order to explain this affection, he assumed that what he terms the moving fibre possesses a certain degree of action or tone, which constitutes its natural state, and is necessary for the performance of its functions. Various circumstances, as well external as inter- nal, were supposed either to increase or diminish this tone ; if it were increased beyond its due limit, tho state of spasm is the result; if it were unduly diminished, the con- trary state of atony was produced. This celebrated theory, which under various mo- difications entered so largely into the speculations of most of the pathologists of the seventeenth century, cannot be maintained in all its parts as it was detailed by Hoffmann; it must, however, be admitted that it made a considerable approach to a correct view of the subject, and that it may be regarded as the germ from which the more mature doctrines of his successors immediately emanated. It has been supposed that he borrowed it from the constricted and relaxed fibre of the ancients, but even if we admit that this may have furnished him with the first hint, it was so far new-modelled and extended by him as to deserve the merit of originality.* This hypothesis of the nature of the moving fibre, together with the more extensive influence which the nervous system was imagined to exercise over the various operations of the animal economy, may be considered as forming the basis of both the physiology and the pathology of Hoffmann. Unfortunately for the fame of this writer, in conse- quence of the multiplicity of his works, and the hasty manner in which they were composed, it is very difficult to obtain a consistent or connected view of his theory ; but, upon the whole, we conceive that he is entitled to the merit of having materially advanced our knowledge of the laws of the animal economy, and still more, of having pointed out the track which might be successfully pursued by others for the farther advancement of this knowledge. With respect to the works of Hoffmann it may be further remarked, that as in the course of his experience he gradually enlarged and corrected his pathological doctrines, and continued to publish them from time to time in detached portions, but without giving them in a condensed or abstracted form, we frequently meet with what appear to be inconsistencies and contradictions, and are obliged to collect his opinions rather from inferences and from indirect remarks, than from any clear and explicit statement of them.f In giving an account of the pathology of Hoffmann, we have somewhat anticipated an important point of medical theory, to which we must now revert. We have had occasion in various parts of this history to notice, that through all the succession of opinions, from the time of Hippocrates to the period at which we are now arrived, with a very few exceptions, the hypotheses were all founded upon the humoral pathology. This opinion was maintained equally by the mathematicians, the chemists, and the metaphysicians. The changes that were produced in the system, whether mechanical or chemical, were equally supposed to take their origin from the fluids, while the metaphysician imagined that it was upon the fluids that his immaterial superintending principle exercised its action. We may regard the publication of Glisson's treatise, De Ventriculo et Intestinis, which appeared in 1671, as having laid the foundation for the change of opinion which afterwards took place respecting this doctrine. It was in this work that the hypothesis of muscular irritability was originally brought for- wards, a specific property, which is supposed to be attached to the living fibre, and from which is deduced its peculiar power of contraction.]: But the first writer who systematically opposed the theory of the humoral pathology was Baglivi. He was born * Cullen, in the preface to his First Lines, bears ample testimony to the value and im- portance of Hoffmann's physiological speculations, and acknowledges the use which he had made of them in the formation of his own hypotheses. t JJ«Zto-,Bibl. Med. lib.x. § 877, t.iv.p 536etseq. Nouv. Diet. Hist, in loco. Eloy, in loco. Cul- len, preface to his First Lines, p. 18-25. Sprengel, sect. 15, ch. 2. Blumcnbach, § -119. Goulin, in Enc. Meth. Medecine, in loco. Thomson's Life of Cullen, v. i. p. 182-200. Biog. Univ. in Ioco\ Of his works the following may be selected as the most original and valuable:—Systema Medicinae Kationalis; Medicina Consultatoria; Opuspula Med. Phys.; Consult, et Uespons. Cent. ; Pathologia Generalis ; Therapia Generalis; Semeiologia; Philosophia Corporis hum. vivi. t See especially the fifth chapter of the treatise entitled <• Dc fibris in genere. Eloy, in loco.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21462276_0001_0075.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
