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/22

8 RESTORATIVE MEDICINE. artificial sweats the moist skin of a gouty man, or turned his urine alkaline with soda and potash, and scalped with blisters the acute maniac and the hydrocephalic child. Were they not right accord- ing to the principles of Elimination, Contraria Con- trariis, or Assisting Nature, or Neutralization, or Counter-irritation? Go round the wards now, and you will find these extremes at any rate as nearly ex- tinct as flint-locks or duelling. Indeed the extinc- tion has been in some instances too rapid; physicians have so hasted to cry ovyov záxov, that they have forgotten to add sipov àpatrov; and, unready with a substitute, have displaced that which was certainly better than a vague expectancy.

If you look down the lists of new articles of materia medica, brought into common use of late, you will see that none are of a nature to augment destructive metamorphosis. Cod-liver oil, hypo- phosphite of lime, phosphates of iron, manganese, soda and potass, ox-gall, pepsine, pancreatine, are familiar instances of those whose intention is to form a basis of new cell-growth, thus being directly constructive.

The surgeon, too, when the skin is lost or wounded, builds up as good a restoration or imi- tation as he can, with collodion or some other