Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 2.djvu/301

 MANNERS AND CUSTOMS IN HOPKINTON.

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��body, in their day and generation, while ome of them enjoyed extra repute. Laboring in an incipient community, much often depended on the personal self-possession of the primative physi- cian. When a person is often called upon to represent the only individual reliance of a dependent circle, he nat- urally becomes an object of a confi- dence that rises to the degree of super- stition. A resolute and prudent physi- cian, the object of such intense regard, can use his position in promoting effects lying on the border land of mystery.*

Dr. Ebenezer Lerned, who became a resident of this town as early as 1793, was the first thoroughly educated physi- cian practicing in Hopkinton. It will be interesting to note some of the lead- ing points in the practice of the regular faculty at this period of our history. Practically speaking, the intelligent rep- resentatives of all schools of healing, hold one principle in an emphatic degree of prominence. The alternations of vital force between opposite extremes is, in the minds of the best practitioners, favorably related to conditions of bodily health. In general, too, disease is a re- sult of a restriction of vital expression to one pole of the natural circuit. The terms tonic and atonic, action and re- action, elevation and subsidence, ex- press the sum and substance of success- ful medical theorists from allopath ists to pure hygienists. The choice of rem- edial agencies lies between stimulants and narcotics, tonics and relaxants, nu- tritives and depletories, action and rest.

The first school of practice known

��*Not to make this fact too historically exclusive, we may mention a compara- tively recent casein illustration. A physi- cian of repute, in this town was called to a patient suffering a violent, intense pain. The doctor gave the sick man a roll of brimstone in each hand and bade him hold on hard when the paroxysm occurred. The man did as directed and was soon relieved. Two sticks of wood had doubt- less been just as efficacious, except that brimstone appealed better to the im- agination, a potent agency in the healing art. We have heard of another physician of this town who said he had often admin- istered bread pills with satisfactory re- sults.

��here was the allopathic. Its dominant methods of treatment were much more heroic than those of the same school of the present day. The processes of ton- ing up and letting down were accom- plished with a promptness and effect- iveness that would at present fail of professional countenance. If a patient were seized with a violent fever or an apolexy, the physician pricked his lance into a vein in the arm and drew there- from a quantity of blood sufficient in his estimation to produce sanguinary depletion and relaxation, and arrest the progress of the disease. In cases of local inflammations, leeches, to bite and suck out the superfluous blood, were applied to the affected part. If blood- letting were foreborne in any general case, the tonic state was counteracted by the great deobstruent, mercury, or some antimonial or opiate preparation. If an emetic were demanded, ipecac was the principal disgorging reliance. Blistering was also a potent means of diverting internal congestions and in- flammations to the surface of the body. In contemplating the ancient practice of medicine, one is struck with the com- paratively exclusive prominence given to depressing agencies.* In fact, blood- letting, mercury, antimony and opium, seem to have been about the only great specifics in the whole list of remedies. Doubtless stimulating effects were more or less sought by alcoholic means, but in the list of tonics were admitted many of the simple substances and prepara- tions familiar to every domestic house- hold. Yet scientific reflection easily apprehends a reason for this state of things. A community of pioneers is of necessity vigorous and elastic in physi- cal constitution. Full of blood and vital positiveness, its principal symptoms of illness would be of an acute charac- ter. The medical re-agents applicable to this class of ills being promptly em-

ting was even employed in paralysis? which would seem to demand a tonic rather than a depletory, unless the prac- titioners were indulging the theory of similia similibus curatur, or the disease were the result of an eiuror°red brain.
 * It is an interesting fact that blood-let-

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