Institutes of health : essays on constitutional peculiarities, sudden impressions, bathing, animal food, London porter and ale, digestion, dropsy and liver complaints / by John Roberton.

  • Roberton, John, 1776-1820/21.
Date:
1817
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Institutes of health : essays on constitutional peculiarities, sudden impressions, bathing, animal food, London porter and ale, digestion, dropsy and liver complaints / by John Roberton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    the difference in some of the more important features, even of the same sort of diseases, which occur in the immense variety of individuals, each guided by his own peculiarities. T.'hus it would be the very highest absurdity to suppose that we could -always conduct our proceedings by general rules, unless in proving, often most fatally, that we were generally wrong. Such practitioners in physic, however, exist, and I am sorry there are not fewer, of them ; they ought, indeed, injustice, to stand no higher in reputation than he who makes a box, or forms a brick in its mould. Every one, 1 dare say, is aware that there are particular individuals, whose constitution, or, in other words, peculiarities, is, from the eommence- ment of their existence, much more subject to one kind of morbid affection than another, at least to one particular class of diseases, whose distinguish- ing features bear some resemblance to each other, rather than, in general, to all such as those who are constitutionally scrofulous, consumptive, &c. In- deed I think a somewhat similar rule may be applied to the whole existing mass of human beings. If, for instance, we expose certain per- sons, with no evident external peculiarity about them, to the influence of certain kinds of con- tagion, they escape untouched by it, as regularly as the scrofulous, or the consumptive, are affected by these particular diseases when exposed to the in- fluence of their exciting causes; and, although many susceptibilities, or peculiarities of constitu- tion, undergo certain occasional changes, B 2 no