[A guide to the treatment of diseases of the skin / by T. Hunt].

  • Hunt, Thomas.
Date:
[1859]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: [A guide to the treatment of diseases of the skin / by T. Hunt]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

    236/260 (page 226)
    or else that the discharge may be compensated for by a scale of diet, or regimen, or a course of alterative remedies, which shall supersede it in effect. And what is true of artificial drains, is also true of morbid discharges of spontaneous origin. This ulcerated leg, or that eruption, may be very safely treated, not only without danger to the general health, but probably to the manifest improvement of it, provided it is healed, not as a navigator would dam up a leak in'a reservoir, but as a skilful physician would heal every curable disease, both within and without, by adapting his treatment to the infirmities of the constitution, parti- cularly with reference to the glandular system, the digestive organs, and any other part of the economy which is liable or likely to become defective or re- dundant in its action, or lame or irregular in its functions. To enter into details on this part of the subject, would be the same thing as writing a treatise on the modern practice of medical surgery. For nearly all the cases which are liable to metastasis are to be found on the broad and hazy line which unites rather than separates the practice of physic and of surgery. My own experience has fully established the convic- tion, that the safest as well as the most satisfactory method of treating local disease is to treat it constitu- tionally—to attack it from within, not from without; and, in cases where there is no necessity for surgical or mechanical treatment, to abstain as much as pos- sible from local medication, or at least to make it secondary to the general treatment, and directed rather to the relief of pain or irritation, than to the ultimate cure of disease.