Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/373

Rh on materia medica of this period to shudder at the nature of the remedies apparently in common use; the details are unfit for modern publication.

Even in the first half of the nineteenth century patients were extensively bled almost to exhaustion in a vast variety of diseases in which we now know with certainty that life would be endangered by such treatment and chance of recovery diminished. Thus, in a text-book published in 1844 by the professor of medicine in the most famous university in medicine of our country, and a physician in ordinary to her Majesty Queen Victoria, it is said that in the treatment of pneumonia

the utmost confidence may be placed in general Blood-letting "which should always be large and must almost always be repeated sometimes four or six times or even oftener. Blistering and purging, under the same cautions as in the Bronchitis, are to be employed; and two other remedies have been much recommended—Opium, especially combined with Calomel, and the Solution of Tartar Emetic.

It seems scarcely creditable to us nowadays that about this same period a low diet, blood-letting, emetics and purgatives were employed as a treatment in phthisis, yet such is the case. It is in keeping with the above, and in strange contrast to modern treatment, to find it recommended that if the patient can not winter abroad he is ordered "strict confinement within doors in an artificial climate, as near as possible to 60° Fahr., during at least six months of the year in Britain." From the text-books of medicine of this period, only seventy years back, instances of wrongful and even dangerous treatment in most of the important diseases might be produced. There is no basis of accurate scientific knowledge of physiology, biochemistry or bacteriology underlying the visionary notions about disease. The real causes of the diseases being obscure, they are commonly set down to so-called diatheses or habits such as the "hæmorrhagic diathesis" or the "scrophulous habit." Also, the action of infective organisms and the intimate relationships in regard to infection of members of the same family being unknown or forgotten, such "habits" are erroneously set down as hereditary. When there is no other channel of escape the word "idiopathic" is coined to cover the ignorance of the learned.

If now we pass onwards about thirty years in time, halving the distance between the above period and our own time, and consult an important text-book of medicine published in 1876 by a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, a physician and lecturer at a famous London Medical School, and a lecturer on pathology and physiology, we find that the progress attained by research in physiology, and physiological chemistry, and a growing belief in the possibility of infection in many diseases by the microorganisms, now demonstrated so clearly in certain cases by Pasteur and his followers, have commenced to do their beneficent work in medical practise. The heroic bleedings and