'The fasting cure' answered / by Anthony Bassler.

  • Bassler, Anthony, 1874-
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: 'The fasting cure' answered / by Anthony Bassler. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    By ANTHONY BASSLEE, M.D., Visiting Gastroenterologist to the Peoples’ Hospital; Gastroenterologist to the German Poliklinik; Attending Physician to the St. Mark’s Hospital Clinic, etc.; Member of the American Medical, New York State, New York County, and Greater New York Associations, and of the Eastern, Harlem, and other local Medical Societies; Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine; Author of “Diseases of the Stomach and Upper Alimentary Tract,” etc. NEW tOBK CITY, N. Y. From the first era of medicine, which commenced with the dogmatic teachings of Hippocrates (B. C. 460-377) and of Galen (A. D. 130*-200), through the empiric period, which began in the sixteenth century with the introduction of anatomy, learning from experience and deduction from meta- physical assumptions, to rather recent titaes, when the establishment of medicine upon a scientific basis was inaugurated, about twenty-four hundred years have elapsed. During this long period, history records the birth, temporary acceptance, and early dismissal of fads, fancies, cults, -isms, and -pathies for the treatment of the sick almost as numerous as the da}'s gone by in the com-se of the twenty-four centuries. Of late years, the advancement of medicine on a scientific basis has rendered these fads somewhat fewer than in the mediate past, and in the last decade the writer can recall only 14 whicli have come and gone or are on the wane of their always short-lived popularity. Beginning with about five centuries ago, the stock of those which were partic- ularly attractive or fetching to the lay mind ran out, and since then repetitions of old ones in new clothes have become the form. Not to be outdone, certain wiseacres then took this from one and that from another and seemingly built up a new one out of the old bricks. But therapeutics under the cloak of religion has of late 3fears been the most popular form and the most readily successful, and Christ and the divine teachings have been forsaken in the intei’ests of personal ambition or sacrificed to the self-inspirations of some leader tempo- rarily working on the ignorance of the followers. In nothing so much as in this subject, with its fascination for the lay public, are self-aggrandizement and the frailty of the human being so plainly evident. From on high, the Divine Creator must view the panorama of the centuries that have been and the world of today with a full realization of the fact that, in this matter, some have«sunk most cleeply in illustration of the biblical phrase “the imagination