Excerpt from Clinical Lectures on Certain Acute Diseases

The design of the lectures published in the present volume, is to describe and illustrate by examples the clinical history and treatment of the more important acute diseases.

There will (the author believes) he found in the following pages evidence enough to show that the ordinary so-called antiphlogistic treatment is unnecessary (to say the least) for the cure of acute internal inflammations, and that the supposed necessity for such treatment rested upon an untenable hypothesis respecting the nature of inflammation and of fevers, and cannot be regarded as a legitimate induction from accurately observed clinical facts.

The conclusions, which the clinical observations detailed in the lectures tend more or less to establish, may be summed up in the following propositions: -

1. That the notion so long prevalent in the schools, that acute disease can be prevented or cured by means which depress and reduce vital and nervous power, is altogether fallacious.

2. That acute disease is not curable by the direct influence of any form of drug or any known remedial agent, excepting when it is capable of acting as an antidote, or of neutralizing a poison, on the presence of which in the system the disease may depend (materies morbi).

8. That disease is cured by natural processes, to promote which, in their full vigor, vital power must be upheld. Remedies, whether in the shape of drugs, which exercise a special physiological influence on the system, or in whatever form, are useful only so far as they may excite, assist, or promote these natural curative processes.

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