Volume 2

The healing art, or chapters upon medicine, diseases, remedies and physicians, historical, biographical and descriptive. / By H. Davenport Adams.

  • Adams, W. H. Davenport (William Henry Davenport), 1828-1891.
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The healing art, or chapters upon medicine, diseases, remedies and physicians, historical, biographical and descriptive. / By H. Davenport Adams. 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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    Naples, and Rome. Eeturning to England in 1696, he established himself at Stepney, and utilized his Nonconformist connections to form and extend a profitable practice. His talents, his stores of information, and his polished manners soon raised him into repute, and his name travelled far beyond the boundaries of the obscure district in which he had chosen to reside. In 1701 he placed his fame on a more certain basis by publishing his Mechanical Account of Poisons, the result of investigations which had extended over several years. He was one of the earliest of that school of experimental physiologists to whom the science of medicine owes so many valuable discoveries. He handled vipers and provoked them to seize hold of hard bodies, on which he hoped to collect their venom in all its deadly force. Having obtained this matter or virus, he infused it into the veins of living animals, mixed it with human blood, and ventured—such is the en- thusiasm of science—even to taste it, in order to test the utility of sucking the wounds inflicted by serpents. He endeavoured, though, it is hardly necessary to say, without success, to discover a specific for the cure of hydrophobia. He made investigations also into the properties of certain chemical substances, the publication of which might, he says, have been injurious to society; nor was this a groundless apprehension in an age when the art of the secret poisoner baffled the skill of the physician. His second work, De Imperio Solis et Luna in Corpora humana, et Morbis inde oriundis On the Influence of the Sun and Moon upon Human Bodies, and the Diseases thence arising), was published in 1704. In the previous year the high estimation in which he was held had obtained for him the appointment of physician of St. Thomas's Hospital, and about the same time the Surgeon's Company selected him to read in their Hall the Lectures on Anatomy. The University of Oxford conferred on him the degree of M.D., in 1707. and in