The 'destructive art of healing', or, Facts for families / by the author of Fallacies of the faculty.

  • Dickson, Samuel, 1802-1869.
Date:
[1853]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The 'destructive art of healing', or, Facts for families / by the author of Fallacies of the faculty. 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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    « resolves itself into an aguish or febrile movement of every organ and atom of the entire body,—intermittent and fitful like the ague, and, like it, attended with alternations of temperature and other phenomena, all more or less periodic in their character. In Disease, as in Health, every animal body, he maintains, betrays this tendency to repeat and keep time. Were not the greater number of human complaints of this intermittently fe- brile or true constitutional kind, how could bark or iron, inter- nally administered, cure such complaints as “ diseases of the joints and spine,” to say nothing of tic, tooth-ache, tumours, and eruptions? The greatly altered treatment of one and all of these various diseases, within the last few years, is itself a proof of the magnitude of the revolution the Chrono-Thermal doctrine has already effected in the opinions and practice of medical men all through the country. Since its first announcement in 1836, there is scarcely a curable disease which has ob- tained a name that has not, even in the hands of others, in numberless instances, yielded to Iron or Bark. The ad- mission of this one fact not only stamps the UNITY of disease as a truth, but establishes beyond' question the unity of action of all remedies on the brain and nerves. The brain is the electric telegraph of the body. The nerves are the wires by which it trans- mits and receives impressions to and from the most distant parts. Through this brain and through these nerves only, can morbid impressions be made on the body; and upon this brain and upon these nerves also, in the first instance, do bark, iron, and the greater number of remedies in reality act. One and all of them act by inducing, like the passions, a new move- ment of the cerebral atoms. Lives there the practical phy- sician who will deny the possibility of any kind of con- stitutional disease being caused or cured by any one of the passions or emotions ? The very fact of a mental emotion curing or causing any given form of disease at once stamps that par- ticular disease at least as a true constitutional complaint. We know no disorder that has not been caused, and in numerous instances cured, in this manner. Gout, tic, toothache, palsy, epilepsy, fever, ague, melancholia, mania, have all, in our ex- perience, been caused ^nd cured by mental impressions. These diseases, one and all, then, are febrile diseases. What is mania but a chronic delirious fever ? and its “ lucid intervals ” but mere inter- missions between the paroxysms of a fever which so many of the mad-doctors, partly from ignorance, and partly from interest, continue to this hour to mistreat! A fit of mania is as common a saying as a fit of the ague; and few of the laity, at least, who, like ourselves, have seen the maniac with aguish cheek or flushed forehead, will demur to the explanation we have here given of thif