Book Description:
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: CHAPTER III. RATIONALE OF TREATMENT. As previously observed, in the introductory part of the Work, the treatment of the Asiatic Cholera has been more unsuccessful, and more empirical, than the treatment of any disease known to the present generation. Although this epidemic is a new one a nova pestis there is no reason why we should not treat it on the same scientific principles as other well known and ordinary diseases. On the contrary, it is the very reason why we should do so, in order that, if unsuccessful, we may be assured, that our failure is not to be ascribed to empiricism, and a departure from those sound maxims that have caused the practice of medicine to be ranked among the other sciences. Had we acted thus, something like a rational plan of treatment might have been adopted; while the medical art would have been rescued from the charge, now brought against it, of being an uncertain and empirical, if not a useless, branch of science. This lamentable result may be ascribed to the fact, that the treatment of the Asiatic Cholera has hitherto been, what may be termed, a Symptomatic treatment an attempt to relieve or suppress the more prominent symptoms, or effects no regard being paid to the cause of these effects, or to its removal. If practitioners, instead of confining their attention to the effects, had directed their researches to a discovery of the cause, there would not then have been so many false theories respecting the pathology of the disease ; nor would so many remedies have been proposed, adopted, and extolled, during one visitation, merely to be abandoned and condemned, when tried, in the next. Thus, one individual, observing that the type of the disease assumed the form, which is not uncommonly met with in tropical climates, of Spasmodic Cholera, ma...
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