Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/490

 to his patient and may be known from the observations of his own or of others, and who afterward compareth all these with one another, and puts them in an opposite view to such things as happen in an healthy state; and lastly, from all this, with the nicest and severest bridle upon his reasoning faculty, riseth to the knowledge of the very first cause of the disease, and of the remedies fit to remove them; he, and only he, deserveth the name of a true physician.

Then Boerhaave proceeds to make a classification of diseases, and among the very first groups which one finds in this classified list are the following: "Distempers of a lax and weak fibre"; "Distempers of the stiff and elastic fibre"; "Distempers of the less and larger vessels"; "Distempers of weak and lax entrails"; "Distempers of the too strong and stiff entrails"; etc.—from which it is apparent that the old doctrine of the strictum and the laxum, which was taught by the Methodists in the early centuries of our era, has here been adopted by Boerhaave in all its essential characters; and also that the treatment which he recommends for some of these classes of maladies does not materially differ from that advocated by this ancient school of medicine. The following extracts, I believe, will suffice to give the reader a fairly clear understanding of what Boerhaave means by the expressions "distempers of the solid simple fibre," "distempers of a lax and weak fibre," and "distempers of the stiff and elastic fibre," and will at the same time show what methods he employed for overcoming these distempers. At the time when Boerhaave made use of the term "fibre" (fibra) in the very uncertain sense in which he here employs it, Leeuwenhoek and Malpighi were demonstrating, by aid of the newly perfected microscope, that the so-called simple tissues were in reality quite complex structures; and one's first impulse, therefore, is to express surprise that a physician of such high standing as our author should have used the term. But we moderns must not forget that, in those early days, it took decades for knowledge of this nature to spread even a very short distance, as from Delft to Leyden, and then to exert its legitimate influence upon medical