The household medical adviser. A complete, popular-scientific work of reference ... compiled from the most recent recognised system of prevention and cure ... with over 320 illustrations, coloured plates and unfolding anatomical models / by H.Muller. M.D.

  • Müller, H.
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The household medical adviser. A complete, popular-scientific work of reference ... compiled from the most recent recognised system of prevention and cure ... with over 320 illustrations, coloured plates and unfolding anatomical models / by H.Muller. M.D. 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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    the maladies by which it is attacked, and of the means by which they can be combated will open ont to ns new possibilities of the physical treatment of disease by electricity which may enable ns to restore health in cases where all our present resources of the pharmacopoea, and of the other treatments with which we are acquainted, fail to affect our object. Lig^ht Cures and the Rontgen Rays. I purposely place here at the conclusion of what I have had to say about electricity, my short description of the treatment of diseases by light, and a few words concerning the epoch-making discovery of the Rontgen rays, because both our modern light-treatment, and the production of the Rontgen rays stand in the closest connection with electricity and are entirely dependent upon the electric current. It is true that the medical men of antiquity were acquainted with a very simple sort of treatment of diseases by light, though electricity had, of course, no connection with it. Thus the Greek Historian Herodotus who wrote 450 years before the Christian Era mentions sun baths. The patients, he tells us, were on bright sunny days placed in a cavity either on the banks of a river or by the shore of the sea, where they could be well shone upon by the sun. After- wards their bodies were covered with sand as hot as they could bear it, and finally they either took a bath, or had water poured over them. Antyllus, also, one of the most celebrated physicians of the times of the Roman empire was also acquainted with sun baths. We are not acquainted either with the date of his birth, nor even with the century in which he lived, though we know that he must have written between A.D. 200 and A.D. 400, but he deserves to be remembered as the first man who practised trachseotomy (that valuable operation which has saved so many lives), and all evidence shows him to have been a man of immense learning and ability. Of sun-baths he says, The light of the sun, if moderately applied, increases the transpiration and provokes perspiration. It arrests the development of corpulence, strengthens the muscles, and diminishes fat. It makes the respiration more sturdy and rapid, and so assists to the development of persons who have narrow chests, and is beneficial to those who suffer from heaviness in the head by strengthening them