Drugs and the drug habit. / by Harrington Sainsbury.

  • Sainsbury, Harrington
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Drugs and the drug habit. / by Harrington Sainsbury. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

    26/375 page 7
    constructing out of the materials of the older con- flicting systems of medicine a new system of such remarkable completeness, so satisfying to the human mind, always eager for dogmatic teaching, that it grows in authority right up to the decline of Roman civilisation, then permeates Arabian teach- ing, and finally reaches Western Europe, where it flourishes unrivalled, if not unchallenged, until the advent of modern science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Galen attacks the materalism of his day and grafts the Pneuma, or spirit, upon the Humoral doctrine of Hippocrates. He inculcates the tempera- ments, discusses the causes of disease as near and remote, also as existing without the body and within its substance, and he raises the question of predisposition into deserved prominence. The four elementary qualities—heat, cold, moisture, dryness, which in varying admixture are found in the body—these qualities he recognises in the medicaments, which in their action accordingly are hot or cold, moist or dry : the principle of cure is by opposition, i.e., by contraries. Galen lays stress on the search for indications and contra-indications in the use of drugs, and he does not overlook the selective affinities of the remedy. Hippocrates first broke ground, but he (Galen) made the ways smooth and practicable, so says he of himself—too smooth, others will say of him. This is the personality which dominated the medical world right through the Middle Ages ; his the ipse
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3