A discourse addressed to the Kentucky State Medical Society at its annual meeting : held in Lebanon, April 18, 1859 / by Joshua B. Flint.

  • Flint, Joshua B. (Joshua Barker), 1801-1864.
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A discourse addressed to the Kentucky State Medical Society at its annual meeting : held in Lebanon, April 18, 1859 / by Joshua B. Flint. 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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    [*] as yet secured a very limited admission and influence in the professional mind. It is always difficult to fix a precise date to the origin of such matters, but I believe it is conformable to facts, and just to persons, to affirm, that the views to which I refer, were first promulgated by Dr., now Sir John Forbes, some twenty-five or thirty years since, and about the same time, by a distin- guished countryman of our own, Prof. Jacob Bigelow, of Bos- ton, Mass. The exposition of Dr. F. appeared in two elaborate articles in the British and Foreign Medical Review, of which he was then editor, entitled respectively, Homeopathy, Allo- pathy, and Young Physic, and The Water-cure, or Hydro- pathy. These articles encountered a storm of opposition, from those who assumed to be conservatives in the profession, as bitter and uncompromising as those that were encountered in their respective times, by Harvey and Jenner—their principles declared revolutionary and derogatory to legitimate medicine, and their author denounced as a medical heretic and a deserter from his professional ranks. Not a few of the oracles of our art proceeded to his excommunication, in ample form. But it is as true now, as in Testament times, that wisdom is justified of her children. Nothing could testify more strongly to the essential truth and practical value of those views, than the steady and rapid change which took place in the profes- sional mind regarding their character, during the subsequent years of silence of their accomplished promulgator, and the general favor with which was received from from his hands, a year or two since, a little volume, entitled Nature and Art in Disease, in which the same reformative ideas are inculcated that had been so distasteful in the Review. It is thought, says the author, in his preface to this favor- ite little volume, that the general views here given, will enable such junior practitioners as may study them, to apply them of their own accord, to the improvement of the treat- ment of diseases, by strengthening their confidence in nature's powers, and by mitigating, in their hands, the evils of poly- pharmacy, and of that meddlesome and perturbative practice still so prevalent in this country. The editor of one of those periodicals that were fiercest in