The power of nature in disease / by J. Wallace Anderson, M.D., formerly physician to the Royal Infirmary, Glasgow, and lecturer on medicine, Queen Margaret College.

  • Anderson, J. Wallace (James Wallace)
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The power of nature in disease / by J. Wallace Anderson, M.D., formerly physician to the Royal Infirmary, Glasgow, and lecturer on medicine, Queen Margaret College. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    and for their own proper natures. They are engines that are moved, not by any skill of their own, but by that of a higher artificer, ^ His fame spread rapidly. Before the end of the century, Baglivi of Rome had frequently heard him styled the doctor for fevers, and a few years later Boerhaave had singled out his works for special study. Sydenham and Boerhaave had much in common. They were both devoted followers of Hippocrates. They write in the same strain. Boerhaave's inaugural oration, when in 1709 he was appointed Professor of Medicine and Botany at Leyden, had reference to the simplicity of true medical science, wherein exploding the fallacies and ostentation of alchemistical and metaphysical writers, he reinstates medicine on the ancient foundation of observation, experiments and deductions naturally resulting from them. ^ He rejects all vain and useless hypotheses. We cannot, he says, understand or explain the manner in which the body and mind reciprocally act upon each other from any considera- tion of their separate nature; we can only remark by observa- tion their effects upon each other without explaining them. And what is Nature t Simply that chain of causes and effects which ultimately terminate in the sovereign cause and director of all things. He has no tolerance for the doctrine of a special intelligent force that directs the processes of health and controls those of disease. I can scarcely believe, he says, that Helmont was so insane as to credit all these things which he wrote about the Archeus ; and as often as he says that the Archeus desires, selects, digests, and expels food, he seems to have meant nothing more than that food is desired, selected, digested, and expelled by some unknown power. ^ Boerhaave died in 1738, exactly fifty years after the death of Sydenham. And as Sydenham's sovereignty was undisputed in the second half of the seventeenth century, as he inspired the thought and practice of Boerhaave, so did the latter reign as the supreme authority in medicine till late in the eighteenth century. Without anticipating the reputation of our own Scottish author- ity, Cullen, it is interesting to know from himself that when about the middle of last century he ventured to deliver opinions regarding the nature and cure of disease differing from those ' Ibid., i. 119, 120. Burton's Life of Boerhaave, p. 31. ' Physiology, sect. 107, note 5.