Notes on health : showing how to preserve or regain it, by diet, regimen, &c, with a familiar explanation of the chief functions of the human body, and their relation to the mind / by W.T. Coleman.

  • Coleman, W. T.
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Notes on health : showing how to preserve or regain it, by diet, regimen, &c, with a familiar explanation of the chief functions of the human body, and their relation to the mind / by W.T. Coleman. 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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    not condescend to explain the grounds on which the objections to them really rest. These grounds are tangible enough if once explained, and are so numerous that we cannot pretend to enter into the whole of them in this preface to our little book ; but we shall select two of the most prominent, and this, we trust, will be sufficient to open the eyes of the many to the true merits of the question. There is this distinction among the quack remedies, so boastingly advertised, that some profess to cure almost everything. Ailments wbich the medical man knows are of the most various, even opposite nature, are included in a long list which the one kind of pill or potion is to cure. These disorders, which are all to be cured by one remedy, are unlike, even in appearance, in many cases; they belong to different families or groups of disease, and differ as much in the place they occupy in the classified system of disease, as a melon differs from a cabbage in the botanical system; and it would be just as reasonable for the horticulturist to adopt or recommend the same culture and treatment in both these cases, as it would be to expect the same remedy to be applicable to so many different complaints. But this is not all. There are many instances in which the general aspect of a disease, and even many particular symptoms, so much resemble those of another, thab it requires care and caution even in the experienced physician to distinguish the one from the other; and yet the intimate nature of these two diseases may be so different, that the treatment which would be found bene- ficial in the one case might prove just as injurious in the other. What else, then, but mischief can result from the indiscriminate application of the same quack remedy to these very different cases. A mere superficial resem- blance, it'is plain, can only deceive those who, on the strength of it, adopt a remedy which, in another case, where it has been rightly applied, may have been found useful.