Most of their teaching was quite untrue—
Look at the stars when a patient is ill,
(Dirt has nothing to do with disease)—
Bleed and blister as much as you will,
Bleed and blister as much as you please.[1]
Paracelsus, who originated the treatment of syphilis with mercurials, made a brave stand for chemical therapeutics in the sixteenth century, but there could be no scientific treatment of disease without accurate knowledge of physiology, pathology and clinical diagnosis. Harvey's physical demonstration of the circulation of the blood awoke experimental physiology from the sleep of fifteen centuries, but had to wait upon the specialization of laboratory physics and chemistry for its further advancement. Modern chemistry began with Priestley's discovery of oxygen and Lavoisier's introduction of the balance. Physical diagnosis began to be a science with the inventions and discoveries of Auenbrugger (percussion), Laennec (stethoscope and mediate auscultation), Louis (statistical interpretation), Skoda (physics of chest diseases), and Wunderlich (clinical thermometry). The therapeutics of ordinary ailments became more refined but the treatment of specific infections could not be ætiological before the development of cellular pathology by Virchow, of bacteriology by Pasteur and Koch, of medical parasitology by Manson, Laveran, Ross, Reed, Stiles and Schaudinn. In the eighteenth century medicine had been an affair of theories and systems, and in each instance the treatment was dominated by the particular view of the nature of disease—Boerhaave's, Bailer's, Brown's, Cullen's or Hahnemann's. Homœopathy,[2] the most dogmatic and fantastic of these, illustrates the trend of drug therapy for over a hundred years—the tendency to treat symptoms rather than to remove the cause. About the middle of the nineteenth century we come to the so-called "therapeutic nihilism" of Vienna, in which practise degenerated into simple diagnosis. This was mainly due to the influence and example of Skoda, an unrivalled diagnostician, but incidentally a whimsical, lop-sided Czech, who claimed that although we can diagnose and describe disease, "we dare not expect by any means to cure it." Great as Skoda's scientific attainments were, his influence upon therapeutics was wholly pernicious, and it became a sort of by-word in Vienna that to be auscultated by Skoda was a possible prelude to being
- ↑ Rudyard Kipling, "Rewards and Fairies," Doubleday, Page & Co., New York, 1910, pp. 281, 282.
- ↑ "Although Hahnemann's "Organon" was published in 1810, he began to practise about 1799, and his theory of therapeutics, with its attempt at systematization, is fairly characteristic of the eighteenth century. Homœopathy has had some good effect upon therapeutics in lowering the scale of dosage of drugs. In the inscription upon the pedestal of Hahnemann's statue at Washington, the original dogmatic universal affirmative "Similia similibus curantur" has been softened down to the tentative implications of the subjunctive mood: "Similia similibus curentur."
