The practice of medicine on Thomsonian principles : containing a treatise on animal life, cause and effect, with the names given to diseases and symptoms described : including prescriptions for practice, selected from different authors, also a description of the vegetables made use of, with directions for preparing / by William Wilson.

  • Wilson, William, eclectic physician.
Date:
1855
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The practice of medicine on Thomsonian principles : containing a treatise on animal life, cause and effect, with the names given to diseases and symptoms described : including prescriptions for practice, selected from different authors, also a description of the vegetables made use of, with directions for preparing / by William Wilson. 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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    Now let this subject read thus: The human mind has been exhausting its skill for near three thousand years to define the nature and cure of fever, without recognising the alimentary, organic or determining force, as prior to and independent from the living state, which force is the maintainer of the constitution of matter on which the living state depends. Fever being the over- ruled state of this exhaling force, the attributing to the living powers that which belongs to the organic force, hath bewildered the understanding. The simplest question that ever presented itself to the mind of a human being, may be presented to the mightiest genius on earth, and if he mistakes the mode of investigation, and takes it for granted that, in order to ascertain the truth he must solve a num- ber of abstruse and perplexing questions that are foreign from the subject, the probability is that he never will ascertain the truth as to the question proposed, but will end just as ignorant as he com- menced them, or come to some grossly absurd conclusion. If a speaker on the theory and practice of medicine should com- mence at the starting point and stop when he had nothing further of instruction to say, his lecture would be very short. But where is the starting point, that is in reach of human understanding ? In reply to this question, truth will interfere with some very uni- versally received views of what is called physical Astronomy. Comstock's Philosophy, on the motions of the planets, says thus: It is said that when the great Sir Isaac Newton was about to discover the great truth, that gravitation is the cause that keeps the heavenly bodies in their orbits, &c. What universal credit an error may have. Gravitation is a dependant power. Now to show on what it depends. For words to start on, we will take from the 1st Chapter of Genesis, 8th verse: And God called the firmament Heaven. Firmament impenetrable vacuum of the absence of heat which locks all substance in icy stillness. In the midst of this firmament is placed that immense body of heat, the Sun. Its powers of overcoming cold gives it a place, but being opposed on all points, it is stationary. But substances like the Earth are affected by heat, and flees from it into the lap of cold, till it finds a balancing point of these two powers, where the Earth