The hydropathic encyclopedia : a system of hydropathy and hygiene in eight parts ... designed as a guide to families and students, and a text-book for physicians / by R. T. Trall.

  • Trall, R. T. (Russell Thacher), 1812-1877.
Date:
[1855]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The hydropathic encyclopedia : a system of hydropathy and hygiene in eight parts ... designed as a guide to families and students, and a text-book for physicians / by R. T. Trall. 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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    norted to Rome, and plagues and other epidemics were attempted to be stayed by such rites as would propitiate the offended deities. Pliny states that about two hundred years before the Christian era, the first regular physician, by the name of Arcagathus, established himself as a practitioner at Rome. He was received at first by the people with respect and even reverence, but so severe was his practice, and so un- successful its results, that disgust succeeded admiration, and caused the citizens to prohibit the practice by law, and banish its professors from the land. About a century after, Asclepiades, of Bithynia, a pupil of Epicurus, went to Rome as a teacher of rhetoric. Being unsuccessful, he turned his attention to medicine, by which he acquired great popularity. His practice was very mild and cautious, and as he denounced with vehe- mence the harsh measures of some of his predecessors, he was then regarded by his contemporaries, and is now by medical historians, as a sort of irregular, or quack. He was the first to arrange diseases into the classes of acute and chronic. His pupil, Themison, of Laodicea, founded a third medical sect, called the Methodic, who adopted a kind of eclectic system, combining parts of the systems of the Dogmatists and Empirics. Like his master, his philosophical notions were mainly derived from Epicurus. Diseases he referred to states of contraction and relaxation, and remedies were divided into two classes, astringents and relaxants. The Methodic theory regards the solids as the primary seat of disease, thus opposing directly the Hippocratic doctrine, or humoral pathology. The First Heroic Practitioner.—The next individual of note whose discoveries or vagaries have had an important bearing on medical practice was Thessalus, who lived half a century later than Themison. By pompous pretensions, swelling self-sufficiency, and abundant cun- ning, he acquired great reputation and wealth; he treated all his pre- decessors and contemporaries with the utmost contempt, and even took to himself the modest title of the Conqueror of Physicians. He intro- duced a new method of medical treatment, called metasynocrisis, which, unhappily for mankind, has been too much followed by the mediciil world. It consisted in producing an entire change in the state of the body, instead of merely regulating, correcting, and removing morbid actions and symptoms after the Hippocratic plan. It may possibly startle the non- medical reader to be informed that a principle so manifestly absurd, Rnd promulgated by its author or fabricator for no other purpose than to get gold and fame, was generally adopted by subsequent medical writers, and is ^w the principal crrser-stone of orthodox medical