"
The practice of medicine has undergone great changes within the period of
my own observation. Venesection, for instance, has so far gone out of
fashion, that, as I am told by residents of the New York Bellevue and the
Massachusetts General Hospitals, it is almost obsolete in these
institutions, at least in medical practice. The old Brunonian
stimulating treatment has come into vogue again in the practice of Dr.
Todd and his followers. The compounds of mercury have yielded their
place as drugs of all work, and specifics for that very frequent
subjective complaint, nescio quid faciam,--to compounds of iodine. [Sir
Astley Cooper has the boldness,--or honesty,--to speak of medicines which
"are given as much to assist the medical man as his patient." Lectures
(London, 1832), p. 14.] Opium is believed in, and quinine, and "rum,"
using that expressive monosyllable to mean all alcoholic cordials. If
Moliere were writing now, instead of saignare, purgare, and the other, he
would be more like to say, Stimulare, opium dare et potassio-iodizare.
I have been in relation successively with the English and American
evacuant and alterative practice, in which calomel and antimony figured
so largely that, as you may see in Dr. Jackson's last "Letter," Dr.
Holyoke, a good representative of sterling old-fashioned medical art,
counted them with opium and Peruvian bark as his chief remedies; with the
moderately expectant practice of Louis; the blood-letting "coup sur coup"
of Bouillaud; the contra-stimulant method of Rasori and his followers;
the anti-irritant system of Broussais, with its leeching and gum-water; I
have heard from our own students of the simple opium practice of the
renowned German teacher, Oppolzer; and now I find the medical community
brought round by the revolving cycle of opinion to that same old plan of
treatment which John Brown taught in Edinburgh in the last quarter of the
last century, and Miner and Tully fiercely advocated among ourselves in
the early years of the present.
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