An essay on the nature of scrofula, with evidence of its origin from disorder of the digestive organs. Illustrated by ... cases ... and interspersed with observations on the general treatment of children / [Richard Carmichael].

  • Carmichael, Richard, 1779-1849
Date:
1810
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An essay on the nature of scrofula, with evidence of its origin from disorder of the digestive organs. Illustrated by ... cases ... and interspersed with observations on the general treatment of children / [Richard Carmichael]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    symptoms I allude to have not been assigned to their _ proper cause; ahd it can only be accounted for in that too ready acquiescence, with which we adopt opinions that have been long stamped with credit, however undeserved, and the consequent inatten- tion with which we treat not only such statements as contradict them, but even the very facts that come under the cognizance of our own eyes, if they militate against authority we are accustomed to — think infallible. Among those who have chiefly contributed to hand down and propagate errors respecting this disease, I would place in the foremost point of view Doctor Cullen, whose authority had the more influence, as he himself assisted in dissipating the errors and absurdities of the humoral pathologists, which he seems unaccountably to have retained in his consideration of the disease in question. In support of this statement, it is only gnecessary to recollect his opinion that scrofula arises from “a peculiar acrimony of the fluids,” that the disease ‘ yarely appears but in children whose parents had at some period of their lives been affected with it,” and his belief, that when it fails to appear in the ‘children of scrofulous parents, it may discover it- -self afterwards in their offspring in the succeeding generations ; as also his reliance upon mineral wa- ters, and his supposition that they produce their beneficial ‘effects by “ washing out the lymphatic system.” : Though these opinions have not, with all prac- titioners, the influence which they once possessed,