Public hygiene in America : being the Centennial discourse delivered before the International Medical Congress, Philadelphia, September, 1876 / by Henry I. Bowditch ... / together with a digest of American sanitary law by Henry G. Pickering.

  • Bowditch, Henry I. (Henry Ingersoll), 1808-1892.
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Public hygiene in America : being the Centennial discourse delivered before the International Medical Congress, Philadelphia, September, 1876 / by Henry I. Bowditch ... / together with a digest of American sanitary law by Henry G. Pickering. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

    25/524 (page 7)
    and the beautiful blossoming out, if I may use the ex- pression, of our centennial period. Let us now examine more in detail each one of the three epochs, and see if they can be proved to exist. First Epoch, or that of Medical System-making, Filled with an Overweening Confidence in our Art, and with little or no Faith in the Vis Medieatrix Natural. It extended from 1776 to 1832. The influences which governed the opinions of the medical profession during this epoch, and Influences during the previous century, may be sketched Epoch3. as follows. The illustrious Boerhaave, with Boerhaave. his commanding intellect, began to enunciate his doc- trines of disease at Leyden, in 1701. With him, all disease was in the fluids of the system. His doctrines held sway in Europe and America until about 1765 j that is, until ten years before the opening of our centennial period. Cullen, of Edinburgh, following Hoffman, proclaimed exactly the reverse ; viz., that all disease was in the solids, and that spasm of the vessels was the cause of fever. What Boerhaave pre- scribed to expel morbific matter, Cullen prescribed to relieve spasm. Both were heroic in their methods of practice. After Cullen, came Brown, of the „ Brown. Edinburgh school ; and all disease was either sthenic or asthenic. Darwin followed Brown, and for a short period his Linnsean classification of dis- ease prevailed. With him, irritability and sympathy were the factors in disease. Our ingenious and powerful countryman, Benjamin Rush, in 1790 (that is, fourteen years after our Revolution began), proclaimed his own system ; viz., that a convulsive mo-