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Doctor in medicine: and other papers on professional subjects
Doctor in medicine and other papers on professional subjects Author:Stephen Smith Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. PHYSICIAN AND APOTHECAEY. THE memory of many now living can recall the time when the physician was his own apothecary, his person all redolent of the ... more »composite aroma exhaling from the health-giving preparations which distended his ample portmanteau, and the daily entry in his ledger gave as prominent a place to pill and potion as to professional advice. In the good old times when cinchona bark, in spoonful doses, was the standard febrifuge, and calomel and jalap the officinal stimulant of torpid livers and sluggish bowels, the first lessons of the youthful candidate for Esculapian honors were in the use of the mortar and pestle, and much of his subsequent tuition consisted in acquiring the art of expertly moulding the pill at his fingers' ends. There was then little need of laws against the importation of impure drugs, for the physician selected each individual article, as he selected his lancet, according to its potency. There was then no more doubtful interpretation of the action of the pill than the lancet; if the latter refused to cut, the fault was charged to the temper of the steel, and not to a change in the type of the disease,or a constitutional peculiarity of the patient; and so of the pill, if it did not produce its desired effect, it was esteemed inert, and cast aside as refuse. Purity in the drug market was then a necessity, for the purchaser applied it directly to its proper service, and personally tested its efficacy, equally as does the husbandman the quality of the seed which his own hand casts into the soil carefully prepared for it. But among the many divisions of labor which the progress of civilization induces, is that of physician and apothecary, in dispensing remedies to the sick. The increase of our cities, especially in wealth and in the refinem...« less