Idiosyncrasies / by Sir Humphry Rolleston.

  • Humphry Rolleston
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Idiosyncrasies / by Sir Humphry Rolleston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    13/128 page 9
    propria employed by Pliny in the following passage. “ The Art of Medicine hardly admits any precepts of general application, and even cattle doctors since they cannot learn the idiosyncrasies of dumb animals insist on observation rather than on theories in cases of disease.” In English the word appears in the seventeenth century: Francis Hering or Herring (obiit 1628) wrote a small work of 37 pages in 1604 against wearing amulets containing arsenic as preservatives against the plague, and in it (page 29) occurs the following dictum: “ The sympathys or antipathys of poisons together with the forces and secret insults of contagious seminaries, are unknown to the Physician. The idiosyncrasye, or particular Natures (as Galen called them) are unknowen, and (for ought we can see) incomprehensible unto humane imbecillitie.” Sir Thomas Browne1 wrote “ Whether quails from any idiosyncrasy or peculiarity of con¬ stitution, do innocently feed upon helle¬ bore, or rather sometimes but medically 1 Browne, T. Pseudodoxia Epidemica, in, xxviii, edition 1672, p. 209.
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3