On the antagonism between medicines and between remedies and diseases : being the Cartwright Lectures for the year 1880 / by Roberts Bartholow.

  • Bartholow, Roberts, 1831-1904.
Date:
1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the antagonism between medicines and between remedies and diseases : being the Cartwright Lectures for the year 1880 / by Roberts Bartholow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    HISTORY. to prove that the law or doctrine of similars was only an application of its opposite or law of contraries. “ Many men,” he states, “ con- ceive that this sovereign principle is annulled when it is affirmed that there are diseases which are cured by similars; but these persons do not reflect that such remedies, although apparently similar in their effects to the symptoms of the disease, are opposed to the causes which produced it, so that they destroy the disease by removing its cause ; thus rhubarb, though heating, extinguishes fever by purging the matter winch feeds the fire. A purgative arrests a dysentery by evacuating the peccant matter which causes and sustains it.” The ingenious attempt of Fernel could not prevent the decline of the ancient doctrines, which had maintained universal sway for so many centuries. When that boasting pretender and iconoclast, Paracel- sus, burned the works of Galen and Avicenna, the doctrine of con- traries disappeared in the smoke. On the labors of the alchemists rose modern chemistry. With the new light afforded by the dis- covery of the circulation of the blood, and the progress of the knowl- edge of anatomy, new theories prevailed in therapeutics. The iatro- chemical doctrine of the great Boerhaave, the animus of Stahl, the irritability of Cullen, and the sthenic and asthenic theories of Brown, for a time held sway within the range of influence of their respec- tive authors. The doctrine of contraries, then, quite disappeared amid the contentions of rival schools and professors. Next arose that eccen- tric and mystical reformer, Hahnemann, near the close of the last century, whose notions, tinctured with the spiriticism of Mesmer, were rendered still more visionary by the radical theories engendered by the French devolution. Before that period, in his senility, when he developed his idea of the spiritual essence in medicine, Hahnemann’s doctrine of similars was merely an application of the Hippocratic maxim. The law of similars was associated with the law of contraries in the Hippocratic system, and Fernel, in the six- teenth century, in expounding.and defending the latter, showed its relation to the former. A little consideration must, I think, tend to the conclusion that, -when a remedy acts in a similar manner to a disease, there must be an antagonism between the force of the remedy and the momentum acquired by the disease. The disturb- ance in the functions caused by a drug must interfere with the dis- turbance caused by a morbid process. If the actions were the same, the result of the combined impression would be an increase of the disturbance. As they are similar only, and proceed from different