On clinical instruction : a lecture introductory to the first course of clinical medicine in connection with the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women : delivered at Leith Hospital, on 18th October 1887 / by J. Allan Gray.

Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On clinical instruction : a lecture introductory to the first course of clinical medicine in connection with the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women : delivered at Leith Hospital, on 18th October 1887 / by J. Allan Gray. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    milk, that ague is caught by sleeping on the ground in malarial countries, and so on. Knowing these facts, we must take steps to counteract their action, and in this respect hygienic medi- cine has already done much. In curative treatment, the first consideration which meets us is that of the vis medieatrix naturoe — the curative power of nature herself. Many diseases tend to- wards cure unaided, and in computing the amount of the good done by our therapeutics we must not leave this consideration out of account. Celsus gave as a maxim:— Optima onedicina est non uti medicina— The best medicine is not to use any—and, assuredly, he was right in cases where nature unaided can effect a cure. But we must avoid deducing from the expectant treatment a scepticism regarding drugs, just as we must avoid the opposite error of a slavish belief in them. Here, as elsewhere, observe the golden mean. Whoso doubts the efficacy of drugs as physiological agents in health, let that man drink a draught containing tartar emetic, or take a pinch of white hellebore as snuff, or inject into his arm a dose of pilocarpine, and his scepticism will receive a rude awakening. Whoso doubts the efficacy of drugs in disease, let him look upon the action of quinine in ague, upon that of the salicylates in acute rheumatism, or of cocain in photophobia, and be at once converted. Of these actions there can, in the mind of the unprejudiced man, be no reasonable doubt. Has the practice of medicine made a single step since Hippocrates? asked Sir William Hamilton, somewhat con- temptuously, in 1832, and to him, in 1875, the late Dr Warburton Begbie made answer, calling attention to the discovery of vaccination, to the introduction of sulphuric ether and chloroform as anaesthetics, as well as to our scientific under- standing of diseases. These might have been sufficient reply, but Begbie went further, and showed that for some of the most potent ails the ancient knew, and for which their treatment could do nothing, we have now some curative means to offer. In this connection he singled out the employment of the bromides in epilepsy, of gurjun oil in leprosy, of cod liver oil in phthisis, and of iodide of potassium in aneurism. To this