RESEARCH IN DEVELOPMENT OF HEALTH 369 



on materia medica of this period to shudder at the nature of the reme- 

 dies apparently in common use; the details are unfit for modern pub- 

 lication. 



Even in the first half of the nineteenth century patients were exten- 

 sively bled almost to exhaustion in a vast variety of diseases in which 

 we now know with certainty that life would be endangered by such 

 treatment and chance of recovery diminished. Thus,, in a text -book 

 published in 184-1 by the professor of medicine in the most famous uni- 

 versity in medicine of our country, and a physician in ordinary to her 

 Majesty Queen Victoria, it is said that in the treatment of pneumonia 



the utmost confidence may be placed in general Blood-letting "which should al- 

 ways be large and must almost always be repeated sometimes four or six times 

 or even oftener. Blistering and purging, under the same cautions as in the 

 Bronchitis, are to be employed; and two other remedies have been much recom- 

 mended — Opium, especially combined with Calomel, and the Solution of Tartar 

 Emetic. 



It seems scarcely creditable to us nowadays that about this same period 

 a low diet, blood-letting, emetics and purgatives were employed as a 

 treatment in phthisis, yet such is the case. It is in keeping with the 

 above, and in strange contrast to modern treatment, to find it recom- 

 mended that if the patient can not winter abroad he is ordered " strict 

 confinement within doors in an artificial climate, as near as possible to 

 60° Fahr., during at least six months of the year in Britain." Prom 

 the text-books of medicine of this period, only seventy years back, in- 

 stances of wrongful and even dangerous treatment in most of the im- 

 portant diseases might be produced. There is no basis of accurate 

 scientific knowledge of physiology, biochemistry or bacteriology under- 

 lying the visionary notions about disease. The real causes of the dis- 

 eases being obscure, they are commonly set down to so-called diatheses 

 or habits such as the " hemorrhagic diathesis " or the " scrophulous 

 habit." Also, the action of infective organisms and the intimate rela- 

 tionships in regard to infection of members of the same family being 

 unknown or forgotten, such " habits " are erroneously set down as hered- 

 itary. When there is no other channel of escape the word " idiopathic " 

 is coined to cover the ignorance of the learned. 



If now we pass onwards about thirty years in time, halving the dis- 

 tance between the above period and our own time, and consult an im- 

 portant text-book of medicine published in 1876 by a Fellow of the 

 Royal College of Physicians, a physician and lecturer at a famous Lon- 

 don Medical School, and a lecturer on pathology and physiology, we 

 find that the progress attained by research in physiology, and physio- 

 logical chemistry, and a growing belief in the possibility of infection in 

 many diseases by the microorganisms, now demonstrated so clearly in 

 certain cases by Pasteur and his followers, have commenced to do their 

 beneficent work in medical practise. The heroic bleedings and leech- 



