THE PROBLEMS OF THERAPEUTICS 



BY SIR LAUDER BRUNTON 



[Sir Lauder Brunton, Physician to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, b. 1844. 

 M.D., Sc.D., LL.D. (Edinburgh); LL.D. (Aberdeen); F. R. C. P.; F. R. S. 

 Author of The Bible and Science ; Text-Book of Pharmacology; Therapeutics and 

 Materia Medica; Disorders of Digestion; Lectures on Action of Medicines; Dis- 

 orders of Assimilation; Collected Papers on Circulation and Respiration; and 

 numerous papers in scientific and medical periodicals.] 



THE subject of my lecture to-day is "The Problems of Therapeu- 

 tics." My audience is a select one of persons interested in science 

 and art. But science in these days has branched out so widely that 

 it is impossible for any single person to be acquainted with every 

 department of it, so that the terms used by a zoologist may be 

 unintelligible to a mathematician, or vice versa. There are some 

 here whose researches have led them far into abstruse departments 

 of science and if they were speaking I should gladly welcome a 

 few introductory words from them on the very rudiments of their 

 science in order to help me to understand a disquisition on the 

 more advanced parts of their subjects. 



Judging others by myself, I think they may be glad if I do the 

 same, and I must beg the indulgence of those acquainted with 

 medical science and its branches if this lecture should seem to be 

 unnecessary rudimentary. By therapeutics we mean the methods 

 of healing. In the great staircase of St. Bartholomew's Hospital 

 in London there is a large picture by William Hogarth represent- 

 ing the Good Samaritan. The poor traveler is seated on the ground, 

 the Good Samaritan is pouring oil and wine into his wounds, while 

 close at hand is a dog busily engaged in licking a cut which he has 

 received in the fray. Both dog and man are engaged in solving, 

 as far as they can, two of the primary problems of therapeutics, 

 viz.: (1) how to relieve pain, and (2) how to restore health. For 

 disease is want of ease, and health is only one form of the word 

 "whole," by which we mean that a thing is entire and neither cut, 

 broken, nor cracked. The closure of wounds is one form of restor- 

 ing "wholeness" or "health" to the body, but it is by no means 

 the only one, for the vital organs lie below the surface, and it is with 

 disturbances of their functions, even more than with external 

 wounds, that therapeutics, or the science and art of healing, is 

 chiefly occupied. As exemplified in the dog or in the Good Samari- 

 tan, therapeutics is simply an art. Certain things are done because 

 they have been found to do good before and so they are repeated 

 again and again, but neither the dog nor the Good Samaritan un- 



