Page:Restorative medicine - an Harveian annual oration delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, London, on June 21, 1871 (the 210th anniversary) (IA restorativemedic00cham).pdf/16

 as an imperfect form of undeveloped vitality, as a loss of something present in health.

Is this new? is it true?

It is new; it is not implied in former theories of therapeutics. I must ask you to bear a little with the unpopular subject of medical history; for the advocates of various principles of healing have made their differences so strongly felt, that their important point of resemblance is somewhat over- shadowed. And their point of resemblance is that in which they differ from the newer medicine of to-day.

The Athenian physicians were the first to recog- nize that health and sickness obeyed a universal law, and not the arbitrary wills of good or bad powers. They considered the important point in disease was the excess of some constituent of the body of phlegm in winter, of blood in spring, of yellow bile in summer, of black bile in autumn. This view still survives in the practice of ELIMINA- TION, and in the phrases of "reducing the fever," "clearing out the liver," "getting rid of the bile," and the like, so often in the mouths of patients.

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