Volume 1

General therapeutics and materia medica adapted for a medical text-book with indexes of remedies and of diseases and their remedies / by Robley Dunglison.

  • Dunglison, Robley, 1798-1869.
Date:
1857
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: General therapeutics and materia medica adapted for a medical text-book with indexes of remedies and of diseases and their remedies / by Robley Dunglison. 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.

    22/556 (page 18)
    It miglit be imagined, that lectures on Therapeutics are unneces- sary, wlicre the mode of managing individual diseases is given from the Chair of Practice; in the latter case, however, the principles are necessarily diffused—not sufficiently tmbodied—and, moreover, the teacher generally presumes, that the student—which rarely happens —is imbued with the great principles and rules, that apply to the administration and modus operayidi of medicines. In the state of health the various functions are executed in a regular and harmonious manner, and are intimately connected by consent or sympathy; but if a morbific cause impresses the organism, this harmonious condition is disturbed; a fresh series of actions results, and disorder supervenes. Physiologists have noticed in every living body an instinctive action—an action of the living principle, whenever manifestly directing its operations to the health, preservation, or reproduction of a living frame, or of any part of it. This applies to the plant as well as to the animal. It is the vis medicatrix naturce, for and against which so much has been said; but which—if restricted to the above- mentioned acts—can no more be denied than the existence of life, of which we know nothing except by its results. It is strikingly witnessed in the reparatory power exerted by living bodies after the receipt of an injury. If we tear a branch from a tree, we find, that the injury done to the parent trunk is repaired by an action analo- gous to that set up by the animal whenever a wound is infiicted upon it. In some vegetables, the reparatory power is so energeti- cally exerted, that lost parts are restored ; and it is upon this power that the utility of certain garden vegetables—spinach, parsley, cress, &c.—reposes. Such a reparatory power is occasionally—but rarely —met with in the animal kingdom. We see it in the lobster de- prived of its claw, and in the serpent that has lost its tail. The nails and hair, too, regain their accustomed length when cut, and the same thing happens to the teeth of the Rodentia or gnawers. Few animals, however, possess, to any extent, the power of restoring lost parts; but all are capable of repairing injuries, and of removing disease when it is within certain limits. In cases of wounds and broken bones, the efforts of the surgeon are chiefly restricted to keeping the parts in apposition, and to preventing the intrusion of extraneous irritants, whilst his reliance is placed on those sanative powers that are seated in the wounded part, as in every part of the living frame. It is to this power that we ascribe all the properties assigned to the cure by sympathy, which, at one time, excited so much attention, was promulgated by the Rosicru- cians, and obtained universal credence in the seventeenth century. This consisted in applying dressings, in the case of Avounds, not to the injured parts, but to the Aveapon that inflicted them. The sympathetic powder of Sir Kenelme Rigby Avas an application of this nature, Avhich enjoyed an astonishing reputation. It was first employed at Florence, in the commencement of the seventeenth century, by a Carmelite monk, Avho had just returned from India. The grand duke, hearing of the monk’s marvellous cures, asked