A compendium of medical science, or, Fifty years' experience in the art of healing : being a plain and practical treatise on the prevention and cure of disease : designed to enlighten the popular mind in the true elementary principles of medicine, and protect the reading public from the mischiefs of quackery / by Samuel K. Jennings.

  • Jennings, Samuel K. (Samuel Kennedy), 1771-1854.
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A compendium of medical science, or, Fifty years' experience in the art of healing : being a plain and practical treatise on the prevention and cure of disease : designed to enlighten the popular mind in the true elementary principles of medicine, and protect the reading public from the mischiefs of quackery / by Samuel K. Jennings. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    piness to hit upon the use of burning alcohol, and finally he- invented an apparatus for conducting heat so generated, to the naked body of his patient. During the whole course of this pursuit, he had no other design than that of improving his own practice. But the fa- cility with which he has since been able to manage every grade of fever with which he has met, in at least four differ- ent States of the Union, has been such, that he cannot recon- cile it to his obligations to humanity, to withhold from the public the result of his observations. He has therefore pre- pared the following treatise, in which the principles and doc- trines, the origin of which he has thus briefly stated, will b^ .found so associated and incorporated with some of the most important elements of the profession, and so elucidated by their practical application to a sufficient number of diseases, as to make his design intelligible. By the employment of the apparatus, contrived as above stated, he soon learned that heat so generated and applied, with very little, and sometimes with no other aid, is effectu- al for correcting predisposition to disease j that by the same method, recent disease, when actually formed, is cured in the same decisive way; that the treatment thus far requires no considerable part of skill, but the necessary decision j no caution, but such as common sense will dictate; and that in the hands of physicians it places within the reach of the heal- ing art, many cases of disease which for ages have been a re- proach to the profession. To extend the knowledge of these facts, he made application to the patent office of the United States, and obtained a patent. As the first and most promising step for bringing it before the public, he determined to introduce it into the army of the United States, then at war with Great Britain.