The duties of physicians in relation to popular medical delusions : an address delivered before the Covington and Newport Medical Society, June 14, 1859 / by Charles S. Tripler.

  • Tripler, Chas. S. (Charles Stuart), 1806-1866.
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The duties of physicians in relation to popular medical delusions : an address delivered before the Covington and Newport Medical Society, June 14, 1859 / by Charles S. Tripler. 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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    rience of the master minds in medicine from the earliest ages to the present day. The analogies Between the two dreams are so striking that we can not but consider them part and parcel of each other. The mind that receives the one can not, to be con- sistent with itself, reject the other. This analogy we commend especially to the attention of those ministers and pastors who creep into houses, leading captive silly women, and, with the forwardness of ignorant conceit, strive to propagate a medical imposture as ruinous to the body as the Swedenborgian hallucination can be to the soul. We are not alone in recog- nizing the intimate connection between these two novelties. In Detroit, during the summer of 1849, we were frequently edi- fied with communications in the daily prints, claiming and estab- lishing this relationship beyond all controversy. Had Sweden- borg and Hahnemann been cotemporaries, we should have sup- posed the two schemes to have been contrived in concert; but as the latter flourished a century later than the former, we are con- strained to look upon him as having stolen the thunder of his illustrious predecessor. From page 122 of Hering's translation of Hahnemann's Or- ganon I quote the following : But a chronic miasm, that is in- comparably greater and far more important than either of the two last named, is that of ' psora.' ... It is not until the whole organism is infected that psora declares its huge internal chronic miasm, by a cutaneous eruption (sometimes consisting only in a few pimples) that is wholly peculiar to it, accompanied by insup- portable tickling, voluptuous itching, and a specific odor. This psora is the sole, true and fundamental cause that produces all the other countless forms of disease, which, under the names of nervous debility, hysteria, hemicrania, hypochondriasis, insanity, melan- choly, idiocy, madness, epilepsy and spasms of all kinds, soft- ening of the bones, or rickets, scoliosis and cyphosis, caries, can- cers, fungus hasmatodes, jaundice and cyanosis, dropsy, amen- orrhcea, gastrorrhagia, epistaxis, haemoptysis, hematuria, me- trorrhagia, asthma, and phthisis ulcerosa, impotency and ster- ility, deafness, cataract and amaurosis, paralysis, loss of sense, pains of every kind, etc., appear in our pathology as so many peculiar and independent diseases. In this heterogeneous jum- ble of terms— Words to the witches in Macbeth unknown— there are several diseases enumerated that are rather frequently