Doctor and patient / by S. Weir Mitchell.

  • Silas Weir Mitchell
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Doctor and patient / by S. Weir Mitchell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    24/186
    work, are more valuable than drugs, and do not exclude their use.1 The active physician has usually little time nowadays to give to the older books, but it is still a valuable lesson in common sense to read, not so much the generalizations as the cases of Whytt, Willis, Sydenham, and others. Nearer our own day, Sir John Forbes, Bigelow, and Flint taught us the great lesson that many dis- eases are self-limited, and need only the great physician, Time, and reasonable dietetic care to get well without other aid. There is a popular belief that we have learned this from homoeopathy, for the homoeopath, without knowing it, made for us on this matter ample experiments, and was as confident he was giving powerful medicines as we are that he was giving practically none. “ He budded better than he knew,” and certainly his results aided our ablest thinkers to reach the truth. I have named one of the most illustrious 1 By this I mean that the physician, if forced to choose between absolute control of the air, diet, exercise, work, and general habits of a patient, and use of drugs without these, would choose the former, and yet there are cases where this decision would be a death-warrant to the patient.
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image