Big Medicine

“ This universal and acknowledged rule is Pathology, the science which unfolds and exhibits the nature and character of disease, and "dictates the maxims of rational practice." It is the foundation and only base of rational medicine, which proceeds on the assumption that the nature and character of disease is fully known and appreciated. This knowledge is not only rational, but indispensable, in order to understand and apply the principles which ought to govern in the medication and cure of disease. ”

“ I have no doubt, that some diseases not yet understood may in time be transferred to the table of those known. But, were I a physician, I would rather leave the transfer to the slow hand of accident, than hasten it by guilty experiments on those who put their lives into my hands. The only sure foundations of medicine are, an intimate knowledge of the human body, and observation on the effects of medicinal substances on that. ”

“ That the mind does exert an influence over the body, and a powerful one, in both health and disease, is obvious. But what we are apt to forget is that the whole history of the progress of medicine has been a record of diminishing resort to this power as a means of cure. ”

“ Although the patent medicine advertisements in newspapers and magazines seem to belie the remark, yet the fact remains that physicians nowadays give less medicine to their patients than formerly and pay much more attention to hygiene, diet, and occupation, both as therapeutic agents in curing disease and as factors in maintaining the individual in the best of health and at a high level of working efficiency. ”

“ And the importance of understanding the true conditions of health and disease—of knowing how to acquire and preserve that healthy habit of body which the most tedious and costly medical treatment so often fails to restore when once lost, should secure a place in general education for the principal maxims of hygiene, and some of those even of practical medicine. For those who aim at high intellectual cultivation, the study of physiology has still greater recommendations, and is, in the present state of advancement of the higher studies, a real necessity. ”

“ It is a common proverb, that one extreme often follows another. It is sometimes so in medicine. As soon as physicians had let go the absurd idea that diseases were the work of demons, had given up their useless mysticisms, and begun to look upon disease as the effect of natural causes—when Anatomy, Physiology and Pathology had helped to explain morbid phenomena, and rational means had come to be employed, practitioners commenced a course of active treatment and went to work with all their might to cure all diseases by positive medication. ”

“ Notwithstanding all that Medicine can achieve, to succour the body as it struggles against actual disease—notwithstanding those resources of drugs and handicraft, by which the physician or surgeon opposes death or mitigates pain in the detailed exercise of his art, all past experience, and every transaction of our daily practice, confirm the popular adage that prevention is better than cure. ”

“ Besides their broad, accurate, vivid delineations of disease—portraits drawn to the life, and by a great master—and their wise, simple, rational rules for treatment, active and negative, general and specific—there are two great principles continually referred to as supreme in the art of medicine. The first is that nature cures diseases; that there is a recuperative and curative power, the vis medicatrix, in every living organism, implanted in it by the Almighty, and that it is by careful reverential scrutiny of this law of restoration that all our attempts at cure are to be guided ”

“ The physician is, alas! too often powerless to contend against the ills that are raging around us. But, really, we can not expect physiology to cure incurable diseases and make men immortal; its mission is to discover the truth, and it is for the physician to apply the lessons of the new truth to the treatment of diseases. Who can say seriously that modern medicine, enlightened by the great physiological discoveries of this and former centuries, is not superior to the medicine of the middle ages? The circulation of the blood was discovered by vivisection. ”

“ The Methodists, it should be added, deserve special credit for having been the first to introduce and carry into effect the systematic treatment of chronic diseases; and, as a general proposition, it may be said that their treatment of all forms of disease was thoroughly practical, free from all tendency to resort to magical methods, and based largely on the employment of such hygienic measures as the use of baths of different kinds (hydrotherapy) , massage, moderate outdoor exercise, passive movements, sea voyages, fasting, regulation of the diet, etc. ”

“ One of the strongest evidences that the community have a very imperfect conception of the varieties of disease, and of the necessity of accurate discrimination, is the propensity to look for some one grand remedy for all diseases. This propensity is exceedingly common, and exists in every variety of degree. Some, I may say many, have the full belief that there is such a remedy, and try every vaunted medicine that comes along, in their search after the great catholicon, or elixir vitæ. ”

“ Thus, for the proper perfection of medicine as a rational science, two things are in the main needed: the first is a right understanding of the causes and symptoms of disease; the second, a correct knowledge of the action of medicines. [Pg 15] Should our acquaintance with these two subjects be complete, we should then be able to do all that man could by any possibility effect in the alleviation of human suffering. This sublime problem is already being unravelled at one end. Diagnosis and Nosology are making rapid strides; and perhaps we shall soon know what we have to cure. ”

“ So the doctor learns to combat disease with science, and at the same time to apply scientific laws of health that he may fortify the human body against the invasion of harmful germs. Thus, eventually, he makes medicine itself less necessary. ”

“ Professor Clark, of the Harvard Medical School, in Boston, in an address of his, recently published, insists, again and again, that medicine never cures, and that it rarely, if ever, so much as aids nature ”

“ James Johnson, editor of the Medico-Chirurgical Review, says:—
“I declare as my conscientious conviction founded on long experience and reflection, that if there were not a single physician, surgeon, man-midwife, chemist, apothecary, druggist nor drug on the face of the earth, there would be less sickness and less mortality than now prevail.”
Prof. J. W. Carson, of the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons, says:—
“We do not know whether our patients recover because we give them medicine, or because nature cures them. ”

“ To employ a remedy the mode of action of which is not clear is quite a different thing from knowing precisely what we are doing. In the latter case the treatment of the diseased organ will be more effective because it will be better adapted to the special needs of the case. It is thus that medicine, being daily enriched by new physiological facts, will at length grow into what it ideally must become; namely, the art of repairing the damaged machinery of the human body, based upon exact knowledge, or, in other words, applied physiology. ”

“ For these notes show that here too he had reached the same conclusion which we noted in the foregoing, namely, that the results produced by physicians in treating the sick depend upon securing the attention of the patient in favor of a certain diagnosis and the proper medicine to be taken for the supposed disease. In fact he says, convincingly, that “all medical remedies affect the body only through the mind.” The one who takes medicine must believe in medicine and anticipate the desired result. The result is then created by the believer. ”

“ He also called attention to the important bearing which the history of the disease has toward its products, and found his discoveries of advantage, even when they were unable to promote the cure of disease, because of the light which they threw upon physiology and normal anatomy, and because they prevented incurable patients from being continually tormented with drugs intended to cure them; also because pathological investigations alone could settle disputes in diagnosis and matters of honor among physicians. ”

“ If in this brief article, which does not purport to be more than a sketch of the tremendous strides made by medicine in the Nineteenth Century, so much space has been given to the germ theory of disease, it is because the demonstration of the truth of that theory has been absolute, and has constituted the very marrow of almost all the medical progress of the century that has been the outcome of continuous thought and study as opposed to chance discovery. ”

“ The practice of physic hath been more improved by the casual experiments of illiterate nations, and the rash ones of vagabond quacks, than by all the once celebrated professors of it, and the theoretic teachers in the several schools of Europe, very few of whom have furnished us with one new medicine, or have taught us better to use our old ones, or have in any one instance at all, improved the art of curing disease. ”

“ This manner of administering drugs can be taken advantage of by the man who wishes to carry with him upon his outing a supply of remedies for the relief of such ailments as may befall him.
Oliver Wendell Holmes once said in delivering an address to the graduating medical class of Harvard, "Young men, you have been taught here at least twenty remedies for every disease; after you have practiced medicine twenty years you will have one remedy for twenty diseases." ”

“ A hearty emetic effected a cure; and the first child of Jerry and Mary Wilson was distinctly marked on the left shoulder with a bunch of grapes.
HOW TO CURE FITS. Not none of the least difficult problems, in the practice of medicine, is the distinguishing between cases of real disease, and those that are feigned. It is a great stumbling block in the path of young practitioners, and even the old members of the fraternity find a few chips of it in their way occasionally. ”

“ As I devoted myself with all possible zeal to the work in hand it was not long before I realized thoroughly that the best way of increasing one’s knowledge of medicine is to begin applying, in actual practice, such principles as one may already have acquired; and thus I became convinced that the physician [421] who earnestly studies, with his own eyes,—and not through the medium of books,—the natural phenomena of the different diseases, must necessarily excel in the art of discovering what, in any given case, are the true indications as to the remedial measures that should be employed. ”

“ For he will be the one to apply new points of view, gained experimentally, in the prevention and treatment of disease. Unless he gains some confidence in the laboratory and its methods and is ready to welcome its fruits how can medicine make any progress? His own contact with the laboratory should be for him a strong support and create in him faith in the ultimate triumph of science over the problems and mysteries of disease. Its influence should reach far beyond his years of training. ”

“ So delicately proportioned in mineral qualities by nature as to make it agreeable and wholesome in health, and in cases of DIABETES and BRIGHT'S DISEASE, or any disease affecting the kidneys, more benefit will be derived from it in 24 hours than from any medicine known to science in three months. ”

“ We know that such a work is necessary, that it is just as important as the educational practice of which I write. We know that without the physical side medicine would fail of its usefulness and that disease and death would reap far richer harvests: I only wish the two naturally related aspects of our dealing with patients might not be so completely separated that they lose sight of each other. As a matter of fact, both elements are necessary to our human welfare. If medicine devotes itself altogether to the cure and prevention of physical disease, it will miss half of its possibilities. ”

“ To physicians who are students not alone of the manifestations of disease but also of the workings of human nature, there are few chapters in the history of medicine more interesting than those which record the welcome by each generation of the supposed advances in the treatment of disease. Each generation announced its cures for diseases, provided its remedies to relieve symptoms, and invented methods of treatment that seemed to put off the inevitable tendency toward dissolution. ”

“ So mortifying an experience I had never before endured, and I think it could hardly befall one now, so largely has the vain dream been dispelled which long was cherished that America was competent to create an exclusively American science and art of medicine, and which tended to hold back the wheels of medical progress. No one doubts at present that medicine had its roots in the very dawn of humanity, and has never ceased to grow in stature and strength, and by its very nature must continue to grow while mankind survives and disease and injuries occur. ”

“ The biological healing system, based on the laws of nature and the acknowledgment of the fact that no two cases of disease are exactly alike, requires much broader knowledge and much deeper insight on the part of the physician than did the old-school of medicine with its search for symptoms of special diseases and its occult prescriptions. ”