Report on the yellow fever of 1867 : made by request to the American Institute of Homoeopathy / by William H. Holcombe.

  • Holcombe, William H. (William Henry), 1825-1893.
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report on the yellow fever of 1867 : made by request to the American Institute of Homoeopathy / by William H. Holcombe. 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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    JO treatment long since adopted by the old Creole nurses, — a dose of castor-oil and a mustard foot-bath in the beginning, and some hot sudorific tea, and an occasional sedative to procure sleep or relieve pain. We congratulate the friends of humanity on the brilliant achievements of the monopolists of medical science! What has homoeopathy, with its guiding law, similia simili- bus, its hundreds of new remedies unknown to allopathic literature, its ethereal doses, and its kindly partnership with Mother Nature herself, — what has homoeopathy done for the vic- tims of this great tropical fever ? Much, very much. In the great epidemics of 1853, '55, and '58, Dr. Davis, of Natchez, Miss., and myself demonstrated, by a practice including over a thousand cases and a mortality little exceeding six per cent, that Aconite, Bryonia, and Belladonna in the first or febrile stage, and Arsenic, Lachesis, and Argentum nitricum in the second or stage of prostration, very greatly mitigated the sufferings and diminished the fatality of yellow fever. Since that period I have been enabled not only to add other remedies of unquestionable value, but to define more accurately their specific action, increasing thereby the scientific precision with which yellow fever may be treated. Although not exclu- sively Hahuemannian in my theory and practice, I here acknowl- edge with deep gratitude the beneficial influence which the doc- trines taught by Hering, Dunham, Guernsey, and others of the pure Hahncmannian school (so called), had upon my mind as to the study of drugs and their applications in disease. Truth may lie in the middle, but it touches always on both extremes. There is of course, for yellow fever, no specific, in the sense of an infallible cure for this disease. It is the tendency of true science to individualize the cases of disease more and more, and to treat each case upon special and not general principles; and still there are certain medicines which correspond so very extensively to the symptoms of certain diseases that they bear