Fallacies of the faculty, being the spirit of the chronothermal system. In a series of lectures / [Samuel Dickson].

  • Dickson, Samuel, 1802-1869
Date:
1839
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Fallacies of the faculty, being the spirit of the chronothermal system. In a series of lectures / [Samuel Dickson]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    has been better illustrated, the Materia Medica enlarged, and Chemistry better understood.’5 Gentlemen, I am inclined to believe with Heberden, that ce the practice of physic has been more improved by the casual experiments of illiterate nations, and the rash ones of vagabond quacks, than by all the reasoning of all the once celebrated professors of it, and 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 diseases. Hence, though they have been applauded during the lives of their disciples, yet disinterested and impartial posterity has suffered each succeeding master of this sort, to be gathered to his once equally famous predecessors, and to be like them in his turn equally unread and forgotten.” 44 Morhi non eloquentia sed remediis curantur,” is an observation some of you may have met in Celsus; yet strange to say, the generality of great professors, who have successively obtained the public ear since his time, have been most inveterate against every thing that savoured of innovation in the shape of remedies. Under the influence of the faculty of Paris, the French Parliament in 1566, de¬ clared it penal to prescribe antimony as a medicine; for no better reason than that it was patronized by the rival school of Montpelier. To gratify a similar spirit, the same faculty expunged mercury and opium from their Materia Medica; and such was their horror of improvement of any kind, that when the celebrated Ambrose Pare substituted the ligature of blood-vessels after amputation, for the cruel process of dipping the stump in boiling pitch, they perse¬ cuted him with the most remorseless rancour. In En¬ gland even, so late as 1693, the president of the College of Physicians, by his warrant committed Dr. Groenvelt to Newgate, for administering cantharides internally, a remedy which the college have since adopted in their pharmacopeia ; and when the invaluable bark was first introduced from Peru, by the jesuits, certain of the medical hypocrites of the time made that their chief reason for excluding it from