Page:Introductory lecture delivered to the class of military surgery in the University of Edinburgh, May 1, 1855 (IA b21916469).pdf/9

8 of the country, and no medical man in our service would dream that the means of purchasing these would be either wanting or withheld. Had an officer pledged his personal credit upon such an occasion, and been thrown into prison for the debt, the country would have speedily come to the rescue. It is a remark of some of the older writers on physic, that almost every country is, found to produce remedies for the diseases prevalent in it; and it so happens that Turkey is a principal mart for some of the articles most essential in the treatment of diarrhoea and dysentery. Opium, rhubarb, and, I believe, castor oil, are there in abundance; and, if to these we add calomel, tartar emetic, and quinine (none of them bulky articles), we have almost every remedy of established efficacy in the treatment of fever and of dysentery, which have ever been the scourges of armies. I have always held an extensive knowledge of the materia medica to be of essential consequence to a military surgeon, and this not for the purpose of drenching his patients with drugs, but with the view that, when, upon foreign service, if deficient in the supply of one article, he should be able to substitute another of kindred properties—that he should, in short, be like a noted