Physicians and quacks.

Date:
1862
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Physicians and quacks. 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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    PHYSICIANS AND QUACKS. Hue, the traveller, relates that when a Lama physician happens to be without a particular drug, he is by no means disconcerted; he writes the names of the remedies on pieces of paper, which he moistens with saliva, and then rolls them up into pills. The patient tosses them down, in perfect reliance on their medicinal virtue. To swallow the name of a remedy, and to swallow the remedy itself, say the Tartars, is one and the same thing. Satirists in Europe would unanimously assent to this proposition. And yet these very satirists, after contemptuously ridiculing the ignorance and hum- bug of medical men, no sooner fall ill, than they resign themselves with abject submission to the pre- scriptions of their butts. Nay, it has been observed that those whose scorn of the Faculty is loudest, are frequently the most credulous of the pretensions of a Quack. Nor is the reason of the general reliance upon Quacks difficult to discover. The Physician is supposed to be guided by Theory; the Quack is supposed to be guided by Experi- ence. And such is the defective training of all but exceptional minds, that there is a very general and ineradicable distrust of Theory, as if it were something aloof from experience; and a reliance upon Experience as if it w^ere free from theory. Yet a very slight examination will discover that the Quack is not only guided by some theory, but is far more the slave of Theory than the Physician is. When he pretends to rely only on Experience, in vaunt- ing the cures he can effect, and the cures he has effected, the fact is that he has not one single real ex- perience to justify his boast. In saying this we are not simply al- luding to the excessive difficulty of securing a genuine experience, ow- ing to the great complexity of the organism and of the influences which act upon it; we allude to the undeniable fact that the Quack does not even attempt to secure an experience. His stock in trade is a Panacea. He has a Pill, or a Lotion, or a Manipulation, which cures most, if not all diseases. He proclaims with emphasis some ab- surd proposition, some theory, which is meant to justify his practice. Thus, for example, he affirms that “ all diseases are owing to impurity of the blood,” and his panacea purifies the blood; or that “ all diseases are due to a deficiency of the nervo-electric force,” and his treatment will “ restore” that force. These bold theoretic assertions are supported by an ostentatious list of cures. Jones was suffering from lumbago; he took the pills, and is now in health. Brown was dys- peptic; he swallowed the mixture freely, and is now recovered. Robin- son was a martyr to the gout; he followed the treatment, and is “ better than ever he was in his life.” Such cases are multiplied and paraded. They may be authen- tic, or they may be fictions; but let us assume them to be genuine, and a moment’s consideration will show that they are no evidence of any causal connection between the action of the drug and the recovery of health. Nay, more, except in the mere coincidence, no attempt is made to show such a causal con- nection. When the public is authoritatively told that all diseases originate in the blood, it accepts the statement as if it were a first truth. Few suspect it to be a theory, and a pre- posterous one. Few think of in- quiring of physiologists and patho- logists—i. e. men who have specially studied the organism in health and disease, and who, whatever their ignorance, must at least know more of such subjects than men who have never studied them at all. Yet surely the first step should be