Cases of cures performed by the use of Swaim's panacea.

  • Swaim, Wm. (William)
Date:
1829
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Cases of cures performed by the use of Swaim's panacea. 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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    The proprietor of the present remedy has never deemed nor really styled it an universal specific; but he became convinced that it was applicable to a greater variety of morbid cases than any other medicine of which he had heard or read; and he thought himself therefore entitled to invest it with the name which would best express its peculiar merit, and under which it had been common to announce and distribute what was alleged or held to pos- sess a similar character. The subject of the following pages having been before the public for upwards often years, and the experience of numbers of the profession of Medicine and others, having sanctioned its utility in the diseases for which it has been used, an apology would now seem to be altoge- ther unnecessary were it not for the circumstance, that many persons have formed and propagated opinions cal- culated to prejudice the public mind, and cause them to number it with the host of quack medicines daily vended to our fellow-citizens, as cures for every disease to which the human frame is incident. That these opinions are incorrect, 1 will endeavour by the mass of conclusive evidence I shall bring before the public, satisfactorily to demonstrate. When this medicine was first introduced to the notice of the public, {at a time too, when no other of the name, of the nature, nor possessed of the same properties, was in existence; and since xohich period, upwards of fifty mixtures, professing to be of the same nature, have been imposed upon the public with the most unblushing effron- tery,) it was supported by experience, unaided by art and sophistry—its utility was practically known to the proprietor, and it required only that the public should become acquainted with the numerous and important cures effected by its use, in order to establish for it a reputation, not to be affected by the artifices of the in- terested, nor the sneers of the uncandid. Under the impression, therefore, that there exists in the minds of many a desire to become acquainted with the facts connected with this medicine, I do not hesitate to come forward, and relate a few out of the great num- ber of cases in which it has been successfully employed. Diseases which had resisted every curative means, and baffled the skill of some of the most respectable practitioners, have been effectually cured in a compara- tively short space of time, by the use of this remedy. What, I would ask, can be a greater proof of the estima- tion in which it is held by the profession of Medicine, than to know that some of the cures were considered so