An address on the present condition, prospects, and duties of the medical profession : delivered before the members of the Massachusetts Medical Society, at the annual meeting, May 26, 1841 / by Edward Reynolds.

  • Reynolds, Edward, 1793-1881.
Date:
1841
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An address on the present condition, prospects, and duties of the medical profession : delivered before the members of the Massachusetts Medical Society, at the annual meeting, May 26, 1841 / by Edward Reynolds. 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 most remarkable of these, at present, is Home- opathy, a system, if it deserves the name, which sets aside all former observation; contradicts all former experience; upsets not only all theory, but all facts; declares war against the inductive science; and acknowledges no organic alterations; which sees in all diseases, only the immaterial changes of a spiritual principle, and in all remedies, only the result of spiritual forces.* A system which gravely tells us that diseases and their causes are not material, but merely immaterial changes in ourselves; that there is nothing in them mechanical or chemical; that they do not depend on a morbid, material principle, but are only partial alterations of spiritual, or, as Hahnneman sometimes calls it, synonymously, dynamic life.f That it is by the observance of symptoms alone, that the physician, however sharp-sighted he may be, can learn any thing of the nature, character or treatment of disease.! That the worst species of chronic diseases, and the most incurable, even by Homeopathic means, are all produced by the heroic remedies of unskilful Allopathic physicians.^ That the only real, fundamental and productive cause of all proper or natural chronic diseases (all such as are not produced by Allopathy), such as the numberless forms ranging under the name of nervous weakness, hysteria, hypochondriasis, imbecility, mania, melancho- ly, epilepsy, spasms of all kinds, rickets, caries, cancer, fungus haematodes, gout, haemorrhoids, jaundice, * Note A. f Note B. % Note C. § Note D. 4