Nature and art in the cure of disease / by C. B. Coventry ; read before the Medical Society of the County of Oneida, July, 1859 ; published by the Society.

  • Coventry, C. B. (Charles Brodhead), 1801-1875.
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Nature and art in the cure of disease / by C. B. Coventry ; read before the Medical Society of the County of Oneida, July, 1859 ; published by the Society. 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.)

    11/26
    of most medical men of sound judgment and long experience, is made up, that the amount of disease and death in the world would be less, if all disease were left to itself, than it now is, under the multifarious, reckless and contradictory modes of practice, good and bad, with which practitioners of adverse denominations carry on their differences at the expense of their patients.'7* If the Doctor, by the term practitioners, means the regular pro- fession of medicine, I think you will agree with me in pronouncing it a libel on the profession. If he means to embrace every species of empirical practice, and the use of the numerous nostrums, the advertisement of [which disgrace our papers, why introduce it here ? or, why leave it to be inferred that he is speaking of the medical profession ? The Profession of Medicine is certainly not responsible for it, for no body of men have labored so hard to suppress it. But even admitting all the evils of quackery and empiricism, there is one simple fact, which is a complete answer to the doctor's supposition ; and that is, that the value of life has nearly if not quite doubled during the last one hundred years, and that this amelioration was mainly effected through the instru- mentality of the medical profession. Dr. Bigelow says, The cumbrous fabric now called Therapeu- tic science, is in a great measure built up on the imperfect testimony of credulous, hasty, prejudiced and incompetent wit- nesses : such as have afforded authorities for books like Murray's Apparatus Medicamentum and Hahnemann's Organon The cumbrous polypharmacy of modern times, is an excrescence on science, unsupported by any evidence of necessity or fitness ; and of which the more complicated formulas are so arbitrary and useless, that if by any chance they should be forgotten, not one in a hundred of them would ever be reinvented. Here, again, the Doctor leaves it to be inferred that he is speaking of the medical profession, or of medical science ; and yet, by his speak- ing of the Organon, we must suppose that he refers to the multi- farious systems of empiricism, which are only excrescences on medical science. Dr. B. says, To prescribe blindly for symp- toms irrespectively of their cause, is often in the highest degree