A new systematic table of the materia medica : with a preliminary dissertation, historical, critical, and explanatory, on the operation of medicines / [Andrew Ure].

  • Ure, Andrew, 1778-1857.
Date:
1813
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A new systematic table of the materia medica : with a preliminary dissertation, historical, critical, and explanatory, on the operation of medicines / [Andrew Ure]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    accuracy of his knowledge, of every branch of his art, framed a comprehensive system of Physiology and Pathology—on which he founded general indications of cure, and a novel classification of medicines.— These doctrines of Galen, captivating from their sim- plicity, from the apparent universality of their applica- tion to all the phenomena of health and disease, and from their introducing an easy arrangement of all the essential articles of the Materia Medica, completely gained the ascendancy over every preceding theory, and obtained not only the veneration of his own age* but continued to govern medical speculations and practice for fifteen hundred years. From the notion of the four elements, Fire, Air, Water and Earth, so fashionable in Greek philoso- phy, he borrowed his idea of four corresponding temperaments; the hot, the dry, the moist, the cold. To one or other of these lour heads, he referred all, that variety of bodily frame and constitution observable among mankind. Perfect health was the result of a happy union of the four principles. A slight predominance of any one gave the character to the individual; and a considerable excess formed the constitutional disease. Each temperament display- ed its influence on a peculiar order ot animal func- tions; each deviation might exist in any degree; and might also be modified by intermixture with another temperament. As there were four great classes, so lie assigned to each, four successive degrees of force. While this pliant system afforded the sophist a rea- dy mode of accounting for the nature of every disease, it promised at the same time to point out the suitable