An address to the graduates of the medical department of the St. Louis University, session 1851-52 / by Charles A. Pope.

  • Charles Alexander Pope
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An address to the graduates of the medical department of the St. Louis University, session 1851-52 / by Charles A. Pope. 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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    achieving vast benefit to suffering humanity. In certain ophthalmia?, where best inspected, and in a multitude of other inflammatory affec- tions, the intelligent and conscientious physician, sees and knows and feels the fact of their power. Pain is the great antipode of comfort, the destroyer of life, the enemy and terror of man. But the Great Physician has furnished a balm in Gilead, an antidote with which we may strip it of its sting. Well has opium been termed the greatest remedy, and more valuable than all others beside. Pain, if severe and continued, will of itself kill, and by its subduction, art with opium alone, may sometimes save life. Under what circumstances is the patient more grateful to his physician than when promptly relieved from the torturing agony of spasmodic cholic ? Again, poisons or other noxious substances are often swallowed either through accident or design. By the speedy exhibition of an emetic or an appropriate antidote, the foreign and offending body may be dislodged, or its toxic properties by chemical means be rendered harmless and inert. With what promptness and certainty are these effects produced, and how many lives have thus been saved! Emetics in catarrhal croup, cathartics in some intestinal obstructions, wine in typhoid fever, sulphu- ric acid in lead cholic, iodine in scrofula, sulphur in psora, arsenic in cutaneous eruptions, citric acid in scurvy, the iodide of potassium in certain periostitic and chronic affections, as well as mercury in peculiar secondary forms of disease, are equally potent and striking in their effects. What physician is ignorant of the fact that the treatment not unfrequently enlightens and confirms an otherwise doubtful diagnosis ? With all these and thousands of other agents, embracing the whole science of remedies, at hand, and ready to do our bidding, have we then no power over disease ? The attesting experience of a truthful profes- sion, as well as the thousands who have been saved from death, and re- stored to health and happiness, will respond trumpet-tongued in testi- mony of the vast good and certain benefit of medicine. The animal organism, it is true, is so constituted that in very many derangements it works its own cure, a fact recognized from all antiquity ? and of which quackery takes advantage to boast its numerous pretended cures. We are utterly indisposed to deprive nature of the least credit for her vis medicatrix. On the contrary, we recognize it to the fullest extent—the physician but assists nature. But again—there are cases of disease which are, in their very nature and constitution, of a fatal ten- dency, endowed, as it were, with an unconquerable proclivity to death. In those, medicine makes no pretensions to cure—they are necessarily fatal, and the physician must needs fail. Intermediately, however, to these extremes, there is a great variety of diseases in which the physi- cian can greatly assist nature, and by the judicious interposition of art and enlightened skill, turn the scale in favor of the sufferer. Under all circumstances the physician can be of eminent service—in the one case facilitating convalescence, in another cutting short the disease, or even
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