1831.] St. John Long on Consumption. 427 



to stand by and note the progress of the malady. He perhaps can sooth 

 the torture from time to time ; but here his power ends, he becomes 

 little more than a looker on, and unless he adopts the not unusual expe- 

 dient of dismissing the sufferer to Lisbon, Madeira or Montpelier, to 

 die by other hands and out of sight, his last visit is paid to a death-bed. 

 There can be no doubt that all this implies either a singular state of 

 barbarism in medical knowledge, or an extraordinary barrier raised in 

 this particular branch of human attainment against its perfection. 



Yet we cannot give way to this supposition. The admirable advances of 

 man in all other pursuits, the dexterity with which new inventions 

 supply the intervals left by old ignorance in the comforts and con- 

 veniences of life, evidently impress the idea that Providence permits no 

 evil without an adequate relief, which however it leaves to be discovered 

 by our own industry, and whose search is the finest excitement to that 

 industry, as its discovery is the finest reward. In medicine, it is remark- 

 able that though we have two or three specifics for the cure of two or three 

 disorders, yet we have no curative system for any one disorder. To 

 this hour we have no decided and principled plan for the healing of any 

 one of the greater distempers. There are a hundred plans for the cure 

 of mania, with as many fathers for those plans, each contending that his 

 own is the only one rational; yet, who sees mania cured by medicine ? 

 Ten thousand cases of consumption are at this moment under the hands 

 of English physicians, and of those, we will unhesitatingly say, that not 

 ten are treated in the same manner; and that probably not one, where the 

 disorder has been suffered to proceed for awhile, will recover. In this 

 state of things there must be some singular neglect of the ordinary pro- 

 cesses of nature, some inveterate adherence to erroneous practice, or 

 some innate difficulty ; which latter, however, we will not admit, until we 

 see better proof that it is the rule of nature to interpose insurmountable 

 difficulties between man, and objects of the highest import to human 

 happiness, and general benevolence. Nothing can be more undeniable 

 than that the medical student is still distracted with theories rising 

 and falling every day. What is now become of the systems that for 

 their time were pronounced infallible ? Who would now attempt to 

 cure a fever on the rules of Boerhave, Brown or Cullen ? What has 

 become of the sedative school, the stimulating, and the hundred other 

 schools, that, for their day, declared themselves the final discoverers of 

 the art of health ? What is become of the vegetable school, the mineral 

 school, the curers of all diseases under the sun, with antimony, with 

 opium, with calomel, and a heap of other panaceas, equally promising, 

 and equally failing ? Or what is the annual volume of the Pharmacopoeia, 

 but an annual libel on the pretensions of the year before; an acknow- 

 ledgement of the blunders, superfluities, and hazards of remedies, 

 which but twelvemonths past were in the most favourite practice of the 

 most favourite physicians ? But now anew sera is begun ; and after hav- 

 ing relinquished the fields and the mine; after having rejected the 

 vegetable hope of Hygeia, and left arsenic and antimony to*their fate, we 

 turn to the laboratory, and following the steps of the French chemists, 

 extract from the furnace an elixir vitae, and draw the breath of our 

 nostrils from the crucible. But the age of Iodine will pass away, with 

 all the amalgamations and precipitates of the chemist ; and then we 

 shall have to rely on some new discovery, equally shewy, useless, and 

 perishable. 



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