Positive therapeutics : a condensed resumé of estabilished facts about the active principles and other exact remedies of positive remedical value, added to the personal experience of the authors / by W.F. Waugh and W.C. Abbott.

  • Waugh, W. F. (William Francis), 1849-1918.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Positive therapeutics : a condensed resumé of estabilished facts about the active principles and other exact remedies of positive remedical value, added to the personal experience of the authors / by W.F. Waugh and W.C. Abbott. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    thus enabling him to treat conditions when they most need treat- ment and when he can do the most good. 6. It enables the doctor to practise the most certain, safe and efficient method at a nominal cost. 7. It eliminates chance and, with perfectness of diagnosis and application, makes medicine An Exact Science—or as near that as it is possible to attain. CHAPTER III What We Replace If the Galenic therapeutics were satisfactory there would be no reason for advocating a change. Its use has not been satisfactory, in any particular, and the retention of these ancient medicaments, crude, uncertain, unpleasant, has effectually nullified every effort to reduce the art to a science, and given rise to the therapeutic nihilism that has paralyzed the medical profession for the past era. It has seemed that the higher the standing of the physician, the greater has been his contempt of drugs. To illustrate this I shall quote a few expressions of prominent members of the medical guild, all which refer exclusively to the antique medicaments we seek to replace by weapons more in accord with modern needs. John Mason Good: The science of medicine is a barbarous jargon. My experience with materia medica has proved it the baseless fabric of a dream, its theory pernicious, and the way out of it the only interesting passage it contains. The effects of medi- cine on the human system are, in the highest degree, uncertain, except, indeed, that they have destroyed more lives than war, pestilence and famine combined. Dr. Evans, F. R. C. P., London: The popular medical sys- tem is a most uncertain and unsatisfactory system. It has neither philosophy nor common sense to commend it to confidence. Marshall Hall: Let us no longer wonder at the lamentable want of success which marks our practice, when there is scarcely a sound physiological principle among us. Prof. Gregory: Gentlemen, ninety-nine out of every hundred medical facts are medical lies, and medical doctrines are, for the most part, stark, staring nonsense. Dr. Eliphalet Kimball: There is a doctorcraft as well as priestcraft. Physicians have slain more than war. The public would be better off without professed physicians.