Essays on conservative medicine and kindred topics / by Austin Flint.

  • Flint, Austin, 1812-1886.
Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essays on conservative medicine and kindred topics / by Austin Flint. 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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    study of the effects of remedies as regards the termina- tion and duration of diseases. The information already obtained has rendered the use of powerful therapeutic agencies far less common than they were but a few years since. It remains to be seen hereafter what will be the further effect on medical practice of continued researches in this direction. Conservative medicine assumes that remedial measures, according to their potency, must either do harm or good; that they can never be neither hurtful nor useful. Prior to the advent of conservatism, this important fact was not duly appreciated. Blows were levelled at diseases, but the patient was not enough considered. It did not enter sufficiently into the calculations of practitioners that if successive blows dealt at a disease were misdi- rected, the effect was not lost, but injury was inflicted in proportion to their force. Hence, it must needs follow that the sick man sometimes encountered, in addition to his malady, assaults not less real because well meant. In this respect, certainly, we have evidence of progress. We are satisfied that we do not err in saying that the most judicious practitioners of the present day accept the following maxims of that eminently conservative physi- cian, Chomel: first, that we are not so much to treat diseases, as patients affected with disease; and second, that not to do harm, is no less an object of treatment than to do good. In defining conservative medicine, we have seen that it expresses a characteristic of the improvements in medi- cal practice during the last twenty-five years. Let us now direct our attention to illustrations afforded by some of the different classes of remedial measures. And, first of all, bloodletting suggests itself, How great the change