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/21

RESTORATIVE MEDICINE. 7 To answer the question as to novelty in a more concrete form, take the yet unfinished collection of monographs on specified discases which we are owing to the labors of our accomplished fellow, Dr. Reynolds-the first and second volumes of the "System of Medicine." Compare cach subject with its prototype in the "Cyclopædia of Practical Medicine," published thirty-five years ago. And in no single essay will you find the treatment recently recommended to be more evacuant than that of old, or more antipathic, or more counter- irritant. In a few instances it remains unaltered. But in the most you read of medicines advised "to support the strength of the patient" in diseases where the writer's teacher would have used the most active debilitants, with the avowed purpose of weakening the disease.

The volumes are in the hands of all, and I will not sit in the seat of the reviewer by reciting ex- amples. We have all seen the day when hospital physicians gave five grains of calomel three times a day to cure acute rheumatism, mercurials and purgatives in enteric fevers, tartar emetic in full doscs and venesection stroke upon stroke in pneu- monia, narcotized with monstrous doses of opium the brain of a raving drunkard, exhausted with