A popular view of homoeopathy / by the Rev. Th. Everest.

  • Everest, Thomas R. (Thomas Roupell), -1855
Date:
1835
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A popular view of homoeopathy / by the Rev. Th. Everest. 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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    nway as their predecessors had done; Humorism was aban- doned in favour of Solidism; Hoffmann retreated in his turn before Boerhaave, whose system presents only a plausible conciliation of all conflicting hypotheses! eclecticism van- ished before Haller and irritability; and Brown revived the strictum and laxum of antiquity; learned doctors, giddy with the eternal revolution of systems, might one and all have ex- claimed, with Faust: — £a jtcfi' t.t nun, id) cawt Sfocr! Itnb bin fo Elucj at* tvte juoor. The medical world, like the crew of a leaky ship arguing about the cause and situation of the leak instead of pumping, was splitting metaphysical hairs instead of healing diseases; * and amidst a chaos of contradictions nothing seemed perma- nent except the sufferings of the patients and the inability of the physician. Whether any thought of this nature was indis- tinctly glimmering in the mind of the friendless scholar, as, with twenty ducats, his whole fortune, in his pocket, he re- paired to the university of his native country, to study medi- cine there, we cannot tell. But a few years only had elapsed before we find him renouncing a profession which bold theory and blind empiricism had divided between them, and devoting himself to the task of instituting a series of experiments of the nature and properties of the various substances which ])ossess the power of acting on the human organism. Pro- foundly convinced that the science would never approach any tolerable degree of ac i acy, until it was based neither on hypothesis nor on empiricism, but on a scientific investigation, on a complete and thorough examination into facts: and deep- ly struck with the reflection, that, before medicaments could be employed with any certainty, their true effects on the or- ganism must be accurately known, he perceived, at the same time, that the source of all the uncertainty of medicine might be traced to the fact that almost all that was known of medi- * See Bigel, vol. i. and Edin. Rev, No. ex.
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