Currents and counter-currents in medical science : With other addresses and essays / By Oliver Wendell Holmes.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
- Date:
- 1861
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Currents and counter-currents in medical science : With other addresses and essays / By Oliver Wendell Holmes. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.
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![impregnated with all the pedicular virtues they so highly value. They know what they are doing. They are appealing to the detestable old super- stitious presumption in favor of whatever is nau- seous and noxious as being good for the sick. Again, we all occasionally meet persons stained with nitrate of silver, given for epilepsy. Read what Dr. Martin says, about the way in which it came to be used, in his excellent address before the Norfolk County Medical Society, and the evidence I can show, but have not time for now, and then say what you think of the practice which on such presumptions turns a white man as blue as the double-tattooed King of the Cannibal Islands ! \^Note AJ] If medical superstitions have fought their way down through aU the rationalism and scepticism of the nineteenth century, of course the theories of the schools, supported by great names, adopted into the popular belief and incorporated with the general mass of misapprehension with reference to disease, must be expected to meet us at every turn in the shape of bad practice founded on false doctrine. A French patient complains that his blood heats him, and expects his doctor to bleed him. An English or American one says he is bilious, and will not be easy without a dose of calomel. A doctor looks at a pa- tient's tongue, sees it coated, and says the stomach is foul ; his head full of the old saburral notion, which the extreme inflammation-doctrine of Brous-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21019745_0041.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
