Homoeopathy : reasons for adopting the rational system of medicine : being a letter to the Governors of the Hull General Infirmary.

  • Horner, Fewster Robert, 1803-1862.
Date:
1857
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Homoeopathy : reasons for adopting the rational system of medicine : being a letter to the Governors of the Hull General Infirmary. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    been administered even some years before, remained deposited in the system, producing a miserable and wholly shattered state, both of mental and of bodily health; but where the patients were, even- tually, happily restored, by the removal of these latent (and there poisonous) drugs. It now affords me the deepest satisfaction to reflect, that I have not, to my present knowledge, prescribed blood-letting more than twice in the last ten or fifteen years, either in public or in private practice; and that I have ever discouraged what is called the active or heroic treatment of disease; a sort of treatment which oft may aptly be described as that which does the most mischief in the shortest space of time. Both in my course of lectures on Materia Medica” (the properties of drugs), at the Hull School of Medicine, and in my occasional remarks made to students in the Infirmary, at the bedside of the sick, I have given the caution to avoid the evil of prescribing too much medicine; but so inveterate is this evil, and one so early imbibed, of drugging patients, and especially that of putting a variety of medicine into one mixture, “ to fight together in the dark,” as the late President of the Boyal College of Physicians so truly observed, that I know how little orthodox my sentiments have been held by many. Nay, I have been roundly spoken of as one by whom neither surgeons nor druggists could live, and have suffered accordingly in the estimation of many. As my patients, however, not only lived but were cured, and that at least as quickly and as thoroughly as the