Pliny, inspired with as truly Roman horror of
quackery as the elder Cato,--who declared that the Greek doctors had
sworn to exterminate all barbarians, including the Romans, with their
drugs, but is said to have physicked his own wife to death,
notwithstanding,--Pliny says, in so many words, that the cerates and
cataplasms, plasters, collyria, and antidotes, so abundant in his time,
as in more recent days, were mere tricks to make money.
A pretty strong eddy, then, or rather many eddies, setting constantly
back from the current of sober observation of nature, in the direction of
old superstitions and fancies, of exploded theories, of old ways of
making money, which are very slow to pass out of fashion.
But there are other special American influences which we are bound to
take cognizance of. If I wished to show a student the difficulties of
getting at truth from medical experience, I would give him the history of
epilepsy to read. If I wished him to understand the tendencies of the
American medical mind, its sanguine enterprise, its self-confidence, its
audacious handling of Nature, its impatience with her old-fashioned ways
of taking time to get a sick man well, I would make him read the life and
writings of Benjamin Rush. Dr. Rush thought and said that there were
twenty times more intellect and a hundred times more knowledge in the
country in 1799 than before the Revolution.
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