l8o UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



poor, that it excited the jealousy of his fellow practitioners, a jealousy 

 which was not made more friendly by his radical departure from estab- 

 lished lines of treatment, and his freely expressed contempt for the 

 therapeutic systems of the day. He writes in 1763 to de Boisgelin: 



Systems spoil everything, in medicine as in physics. In the one as in the other there 

 is need of observation, reflexion, attention. This road is less pleasant and harder, but 

 on it alone are we safe from error. 



Elsewhere he writes : 



I have pondered my patients, not my books. 



Fully to appreciate the meaning of this criticism and the reasons for 

 the popularity of the new methods of practice which he instituted, it 

 must be remembered that much stress was laid at that time upon the 

 philosophic theories of disease based upon insufficient knowledge of 

 facts; while the means of treatment adopted for all and every ailment 

 were violent emetics and purgatives and repeated copious bleedings. 

 For instance, in a letter he writes to the countess d'Arcussia, commenting 

 on the treatment she had received: 



I recall, madame, that a patient from one of the foremost cities in France, who was 

 much more ill than you, consulted me some six years ago about her eight hundred and 

 thirty-third bleeding, which, although ordered by her physician, had failed to draw blood. 

 .... She had been directed to return in a week, as "between now and then perhaps 

 some blood will form." 



It was for such harsh, ill-considered measures that Tronchin substituted 

 the simple treatment which we should now call hygienic living. " Sim- 

 plicity in medicine," he wrote, "is sure to follow when one watches 

 nature. The number of specifics diminishes in proportion as wisdom 

 grows." 



It is a curious comment on the ways of the human intellect that this 

 fight for rational observation and simple means of cure has been always 

 a recurring necessity. The letters of Tronchin read almost to the word 

 with the pleas made a century later by men like Dr. Holmes and Dr. 

 Bigelow, and he himself said "Hippocrates was the originator of any 

 system which I may have, namely, that of observation of nature, and 

 obedience to the reasoning thence deduced." 



Simplicity and temperance in diet, sufficient exercise, and abundant 

 fresh air were the members of his professional trinity. Always and 



