By and by a new reputation will be made by some
discontented practitioner, who, tired of seeing patients die with their
skins full of whiskey and their brains muddy with opium, returns to a
bold antiphlogistic treatment, and has the luck to see a few patients of
note get well under it. So of the remedies which have gone out of
fashion and been superseded by others. It can hardly be doubted that
they will come into vogue again, more or less extensively, under the
influence of that irresistible demand for change just referred to.
Then will come the usual talk about a change in the character of disease,
which has about as much meaning as that concerning "old-fashioned
snow-storms." "Epidemic constitutions" of disease mean something, no
doubt; a great deal as applied to malarious affections; but that the
whole type of diseases undergoes such changes that the practice must be
reversed from depleting to stimulating, and vice versa, is much less
likely than that methods of treatment go out of fashion and come in
again. If there is any disease which claims its percentage with
reasonable uniformity, it is phthisis. Yet I remember that the reverend
and venerable Dr. Prince of Salem told me one Commencement day, as I was
jogging along towards Cambridge with him, that he recollected the time
when that disease was hardly hardly known; and in confirmation of his
statement mentioned a case in which it was told as a great event, that
somebody down on "the Cape" had died of "a consumption.
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