Introductory address delivered at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York : October 16, 1855 / by Jno. C. Dalton, Jun.

  • Dalton, John Call, 1825-1889.
Date:
1855
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Introductory address delivered at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York : October 16, 1855 / by Jno. C. Dalton, Jun. 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.)

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    health. Now we are to study the mode in which these drugs modify its morbid actions, so as to bring them back to a healthy condition. Plainly, this is a problem, complicated though not inextricable; and one which demands that we should bear constantly in mind all the necessary preliminaries. Keeping these in view, we proceed farther on, to the study of Therapeutics by themselves. The results, again, of this study must be worked out by direct observation, and cannot be deduced from any knowledge previously acquired. We must, it is true, know the action of drugs on the healthy body; because, without such knowledge, our direct study of their action on the morbid functions would be blind, and lead to no definite result. But this direct study is not the less indispens- able. Because a particular drug produces atrophy in a healthy organ it does not follow that it will produce atrophy in that organ when inflamed; because the actions on which it operates are different in the second case from what they are in the first. Therapeutics, then, presents no exception, in this respect, to the rule that governs the other departments. We see the necessity, also, in Therapeutics, of regarding the disease as what it is, viz.: a group of morbid actions only,—and of studying the effect of drugs on these morbid actions. Otherwise we shall run the risk of mistaking the value of certain facts and methods, and of making them use- less or injurious, when, properly estimated, they might have been sources of advantage. Take, for instance, the numerical method, at one time so much in vogue as a means of investi- gation—valuable if confined to its legitimate objects, but a source of error if it be taken, as it sometimes is, as an unde- \ hating formula, by which all questions in Therapeutics are to be settled. According to this plan, to learn how to treat pneumonia, we collect a thousand, or, if possible, five thou- sand cases of it, and count the results of a certain mode of treatment; adopting or rejecting it accordingly. This would all be right if pneumonia' were really the subject of our study in any particular case. But it is not The subject of