Elements of therapeutics and materia medica : to which are prefixed two discourses on the history and improvement of the materia medica, originally delivered as introductory lectures.

  • Chapman, Nathaniel, 1780-1853.
Date:
1821-
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Elements of therapeutics and materia medica : to which are prefixed two discourses on the history and improvement of the materia medica, originally delivered as introductory lectures. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Lamar Soutter Library, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

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    important, are the colocyntb, the scammony, the elat'rriiirn, the black and white hellebore, the nier- curialis, the elder, the leek, the onion, the parsley, the cantharides, the henbane, the silphium, suppos- ed to be the asafoeiida, the mandrae^ora, several prepanuions of the poppy—and of mineral substan- ces, some of the combinationsof copper, and proba- bly also of antimony. He practised venesection, and topical bleeding by scarificvjtions and cups—and v as entirely conversant vvitli the use of eneineia, and of the whole routine of bathing, frictions, exercise, diet, Sec. exhibiting on the whole, a pretty ample catalogue of remedial agents, and auxiliary expedi- ents and resources. Excepting .Anatomy, the study of wlilch,was ea- gerly prosecuted, licile was done after the age of Hippocrates, for any province of medicine, in Greece. Of the materia medica, the chief nromoters were the philosophers, who, cultivating naturj^l history, made some small and indirect accessions to it. To Aristotle, I more particularly allude : a man of such various powers and extensive attainments, as even in medicine to have eclipsed all its professed votaries of the age, and to have impressed on it, the character of his own peculiar views. Yet, whatever may be our obligations to him, in other respects, certain it is, that while he enlarged the boundaries, he greatly corrupted medicine, by introducing into it the crudities of other branches of knowledge, sufficiently erroneous, and between which and our science, there is no immediate af- finity. The acquisitions of the Greeks, became for the