Avenues to health / by Eustace H. Miles.

  • Eustace Miles
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Avenues to health / by Eustace H. Miles. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    410/462 page 392
    There was not an hour during the twenty-four in which there was not dosing either to cure the disease or to sustain the system. The average quantity of whisky was six ounces daily, and of milk, nearly a quart.” [This, and many other cases. Dr. Dewey completely cured by the Fasting-plan]. “ As the years went on, my faith in remedies did not increase ; but I had to dose to meet the superstitious needs of the people. “ The features of my hospital service that impressed me most were the post-mortem revelations, and the diverse treatments for the same disease. Post-mortem examinations often revealed chronic diseases whose existence could not have been suspected during life, and which yet had made death inevitable.” With regard to the cures which are so often attributed entirely to the drugs, he writes :— “ Most of the cases of disease that fall to the care of the physician are trivial, self-limited, and rapidly recover under even the most crucifying doses—Nature really winning the victories, the physician carrying off the honours.” The tendency to abandon the empirical and drug method, and to try simpler and cheaper and more natural remedies, is slowly gaining ground with the best members of the profession. But the rank and file still remain comparatively unaffected. Drug treatment (or some other expensive prescription) still prevails, even when it is combined with the recommendation of open air, or massage, or hot or Turkish baths, or rest. This attitude of conservatism was well illustrated by a report bn the claims of Mesmer, in Paris, in the eighteenth century. Benjamin Franklin was a member of the Commission, which was composed of physicians and members of the Academy of Sciences. This Commission confessed that the effects of mesmerism were wonderful j they referred these to the imagination of the patients ; they concluded that the subject was not worth a further scientific investigation. If imagination really healed the patients, who un- doubtedly were healed somehow, then the decision tO*
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