Page:Of the Gout - Stukeley - 1734.djvu/83

Rh was the first that discover'd the true method of treating those tender years with medicin. He dy'd in July 1732. aged 85. This sagacious author thus wrote, just 50 years ago, in his treatise call'd Pharmacologia antiempirica, printed 1683. "The gout, says he, is an habitual disposition in nature to throw off offensive humor, critically upon the joints. The cure of the gout and the cure of the fitt are two very different things. If instead of a fitt, that would, according to the course of nature, hold him 6 or 8 weeks in pain and weakness: he should be reliev'd of his pain in a few hours, and deliver'd of his weakness in a few days, he has reason to thank God for this assistance of art, and to embrace it with joy."

"The first thing therefore, and the chief that is to be done in the fitt, is to take away the pain in each part, where the defluxion has fallen, by proper outward applications: and to free the parts, as well as may be, from that load; which within swells and dilates præternaturally the fibrils. The pain being often so great, as to cause a symptomatic fever with it, we ought diligently to apply our selves, to remove this grievous pain. And a man may as well maintain that it would be injurious Rh