Looking back : a glance from empiricism to experiment, from superstition to research : Christian science refuted : delivered before The Middlesex Hospital Medical Society, on November 11th, 1909 / by Sir Henry Morris.

  • Morris, Henry, Sir, 1844-1926.
Date:
1909
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Looking back : a glance from empiricism to experiment, from superstition to research : Christian science refuted : delivered before The Middlesex Hospital Medical Society, on November 11th, 1909 / by Sir Henry Morris. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    saved by the physician Antonius Musa, who insisted that hot medicines, in his experience, were the only remedies for the disease from which Caesar was suffering; all the rest of his doctors had thought the same about cold medicines. Herodotus tells that the Lybians professed that persons were prevented from having catarrh for the rest of their lives if the veins of the head and temples had been burned and cauterized when they were four years old. Gralen reported a case to prove that leprosy was cured by wine drunk out of a vessel into which a viper had crawled. Montaigne, the earliest systematic sceptical writer in the French language, published at the end of the sixteenth century an amusing but satirical essay on physic and phy- sicians. He mentions many of the empirical remedies then in use, such as “ the left foot of a tortoise, the urine of a lizard, the dung of an elephant, the liver of a mole, and blood drawn from under the right wing of a white pigeon.” Montaigne comments at some length on his own suffer- ings from stone in the bladder. He avoided being treated by physicians, and no wonder, for he adds, “and for us who have the stone, so scornfully do they use us in our miseries ” that they prescribe “ the excrements of rats beaten into a powder.” He learnt the fallacy of the idea that the blood of a he-goat was a remedy for stone, by having one killed and finding stones within its body. From Montaigne’s own account, however, it is clear they were not urinary calculi but bezoars, which are not uncommon in the stomachs of goats, antelopes, and other animals, and which formerly were esteemed as antidotes to all poisons. Montaigne illustrates what he describes as “ the variety and weakness of the rationale of the profession,” by citing the reasons given by one set of physicians why aperitive medicines are proper for persons subject to the stone, and the reasons given by another set why aperitive medicines are dangerous to those same persons, by tending “to create gravel, and to occasion a certain and most painful death.” Here in this Hospital public opinion has required us to try numerous purely empirical drugs for cancer, such