John Scott on the treatment of diseases of the joints, and of ulcers and chronic inflammation : a new edition, with an introduction and a chapter on the constitutional origin and treatment of diseases of the joints / by William Henry Smith.

  • Scott, John, 1798-1846.
Date:
1857
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: John Scott on the treatment of diseases of the joints, and of ulcers and chronic inflammation : a new edition, with an introduction and a chapter on the constitutional origin and treatment of diseases of the joints / by William Henry Smith. 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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    on such questions, answered on purely theoretical grounds, that very many real improvements in surgery and medicine have been first inefficiently tried, injudiciously modified, and then rejected from practice. It is an inefficient application of Mr. Scott's principles of perfect repose, counter-irritation, and mercurial-stimulation, associated and employed simultaneously, when mere gum, or wooden splints and calico bandages are substituted for his applications, and no fair argument either for or against his method can be drawn from the utter failure of the latter. It is not difficult to assign the reason for this substitution having been adopted. Mr. Scott's plan involves a great amount of personal trouble to the surgeon; it requires con- siderable manual skill, and far more manual labour, to dress a joint in his way than is exerted to amputate a limb. Nothing is left to the patient himself, who has to resign himself into the surgeon's hands as completely as he does for a great opera- tion ; and the mere packing up a joint in a way favourable to a slow process of cure ensuing, neither gratifies the taste nor imagination ; but in humble and permanent usefulness it equals, perhaps surpasses, the more brilliant efforts of surgery. In a literary point of view, few books are more susceptible of abridgment than this of Mr. Scott's, but it has been deemed expedient to republish it entire, because when the principles and practice it describes and commends are stated as naked propositions, without a full relation of the evidence upon which they arose and are based, it is not so manifest that a slight departure from the course of treatment in some of its details will defeat the whole end and aim of the method. But this is seen at once if the book itself is read. Moreover, it is the greatest evil incident to the literature of medicine, that most practitioners are content, perhaps compelled for want of time, to read of remedies, methods of cure, and histones of diseases