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
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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![[6] their assaults upon the articles, thus notices the later utter- ance of the same truths, in the volume: This book gives explicit and coherent expression to that feeling of reaction against violent and purturbative practice, which has been going on in the profession for the last twenty rears, and may now be considered as settled and fixed. He explodes, almost by a simple statement of it, the opinion of disease being a separate entity destructible by the introduction into the system of an appropriate remedy; and he recalls to our attention, in a truly philosophic form, the sanative powers of nature. Prof. Bigelow was a little in advance of his British co-laborer, in point of time, but his reclamations were, at first, not quite so pointed or general. Twenty-eight years ago, on an anniver- sary occasion, in a sister State, precisely analagous to that which has called us together, this gentleman, in the exercise of the same function which it is my privilege to exercise now, read to the Massachusetts Medical Society his well known discourse on Self-limited Diseases. Although this discourse was mainly devoted, as its title implies, to the exposition of the author's conservative views of the treatment of a particu- lar class of diseases, yet there is running through it a tone of disapprobation of the prevalent style of therapeutics, and an expression of reliance upon the sanative powers of nature, which places it in the same category with the subsequent pro- ductions of his enlightened compeer and fellow-reformer on the other side of the Atlantic. Since the period of these remarkable productions, the medical mind has been exercising itself every where, with different degrees of interest and success, in applying their principles and doctrines to the current manifestation of disease, and the methods of its treatment. Where ever this test of the new views of practice has been faithfully applied, it is wonderful how uniformly they have been sustained by the results of ex- perience. The dogmatic relations hitherto established between diseases and their pharmaceutical remedies, are, to a greater and greater extent, distrusted, and the vis medicatrix is invoked and depended on with more and more confidence and frequency. One after another of the converts thus made to the new dis-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21119715_0008.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
