Petition against blood-letting : to the legislature of the State of New York.

  • Turner, William, -1858.
Date:
[1851?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Petition against blood-letting : to the legislature of the State of New York. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    JuAgg* ( Ufa) PETITION AGAINST BLOOD-LETTING. TO THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK. The prayer of your petitioner respectfully sets forth :— That he commenced the study of Medicine in New York, his native city, nearly a third of a century ago, and that he is now practising physic there. That the result of his study and of his observation of the experience of others is, that the practice of blood-letting in diseases is destructive, and he therefore prays that the use of the lancet for that purpose, may be made penal, by statute. Your petitioner has the honor here- with to present your honorable body with a copy of the Fallacies of the Faculty, written by Dr. Samuel Dickson, of London, containing arguments derived from expe- rience, the reason, and logical induction, against the practice, which arguments have now been before the public fifteen years, and which the profession have not so much as even attempted to refute. Your petitioner is aware that some time ago, when an eminent physician presented a similar petition to the King of Prussia, he was laughed at from one end of Europe to the other; but fortified by the arguments referred to, your memorialist is not at all in- timidated by the mortifying example. Your petitioner might produce many further proofs of the alleged destructiveness of medical abstraction of blood, but he contents himself by referring to the memorable case of General Washington, who succumbed in twenty-four hours to the sanguinary treatment resorted to for a simple sore throat; and to the more recent cases of Gene- rals Harrison and Taylor, whereby the government of the country was changed and the will of the people thwarted, by an ignorance of the laws which constitute the economy of the human body, not to be found even among nations the most barbarous. And your petitioner, as in duty bound, will ever pray. WM. TURNER, M.D. New York, March 17, 1851. In view of the fact that no counter memorials, in favor of blood-letting, have been presented to the Legislature, the New York Tribune, of May 3, quotes the following :— The Lancet.—The proposition before the Legislature to make blood-letting in dis- eases penal is unopposed. The lancet is without a defender. Judgment must be taken against.it pro confesso. When we remember the unanimity with which the indis- pensability of this insidious instrument was insisted upon, less than six years a<*o the revolution is most extraordinary.—N. Y. Sunday Courier. The New York Evening Post, in publishing Dr. Turners Memorial, precedes it with the following remarks :— The author of the following petition is at least entitled to the praise of directness and openness in his mode of proceeding. Instead of asking that power be delegated to a public body to persecute those who adopt a different method from himself in the treatment of diseases, he calls on the Legislature to prohibit that method by institut- ing processes and penalties against it. He is right. If we are to have medical persecution at all, let it come in such a shape that its nature may be fully appreciated; let us have it without any disguise. Let the penalties be certain, so that any body who enters upon the practice of Medi- cine may be fully aware of the danger he incurs by adopting illegal methods of cure. From the New York Tribune, April, 1847. IS THE BLOOD ALIVE ? To Ike Editor:—One of your correspondents noticed the other day the discovery by a French physiologist, of the vitality of each globule of blood. To show that this fact