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First Lines of Therapeutics as Based on the Modes and the Processes of Healing
First Lines of Therapeutics as Based on the Modes and the Processes of Healing Author:Alexander Harvey General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1879 Original Publisher: Appleton Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select... more » from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: LECTUEE FOUETH. The causes that have retarded the progress of Therapeutics, and the agencies now helping it on. I. Neglect of the study of the curative processes of Nature, and the influence un the minds of medical men of the circumstances under which medical practice is commonly carried on. II. Influence of the more thorough study in re cent years of the Natural History of diseases, -- of our improved knowledge of Physiology, -- of higher general culture in the profession, -- of the revelations of Homceo- pathy -- all leading to greater reliance on the powers of Nature, and to a larger disuse of the " Heroic Arms" and the " Artillery" of Art. 1. One reason and a very potent reason why medical men so largely fall into the error of over-rating Art and of under-rating Nature in the cure of disease, is, that their attention is not in early life, or during their pupilage, directed as it ought to be to the foundation- principles of natural Therapeutics, that is, to the workings of the Vis Medicatrix Natur. 2. We have seen that the circumstances of actual- practice, as ordinarily carried on among us, are such as tend strongly, and habitually, and unwittingly, to mislead the judgment. Nor is this misleading effect one that a few months or a few years of practice will dispel. The true relation of Nature to Art is not amatter so plain as to require no special instruction, -- so clear and simple that the young practitioner will soon discover it of himself. The considerations adduced in my previous lecture are sufficient to shew that causes are ever in operation tending powerfully ...« less