Forty Years in the Wilderness of Pills and Powders: Cogitations and Confessions of an Aged PhysicianAlcott, William A. (William Andrus)
Science
Forty Years in the Wilderness of Pills and Powders: Cogitations and Confessions of an Aged Physician
Alcott, William A. (William Andrus)
Medicine -- Anecdotes
Whether she recovered entirely, I never knew. The far greater
probability is, that she remained more comfortable through the summer
and autumn, but that the injudicious management of the next winter and
spring reduced her to her former condition, or to a condition much
worse. People are exceedingly forgetful even of their dearest rights and
interests. They may, perhaps, exert themselves in the moment of great
and pressing danger; but as soon as the danger appears to be somewhat
over they relapse into their former stupidity.
There is, however, much reason for believing that consumptive people
might often live on many years beyond their present scanty limit, could
they be made to feel that their recovery depends, almost wholly, on a
strict obedience to the laws of health, and not on taking medicine. If
Miss H., by strict obedience, could recover from a dangerous condition,
and enjoy six or eight months of tolerable health, is it not highly
probable, to say the least, that a rigid pursuance of the same course
would have kept her from a relapse into her former low and dangerous
condition?
It is in this way, as I suppose, that consumption is to be cured, if
cured at all. It is to be _postponed_. In some cases it can be postponed
one year; in some, five years; in some, ten, fifteen, or twenty; in a
few, forty or fifty. It is in this respect with consumption, however, as
it is with other diseases. In a strictly pathological sense, no disease
is ever entirely cured. In one way or another its effects are apt to be
permanent. The only important difference, in this particular, between
consumption and other diseases, is, that since the lungs are vital
organs, more essential to life and health than some other organs or
parts, the injury inflicted on them is apt to be deeper, and more likely
to shorten, with certainty, the whole period of our existence.
Connected with this subject, viz., the treatment of consumption, there
is probably much more of quackery than in any other department of
disease which could possibly be mentioned. One individual who makes
pretensions to cure, in this formidable disease, and who has written and
spoken very largely on the subject, heralds his own practice with the
following proclamation: "Five thousand persons cured of consumption in
one year, by following the directions of this work." Another declares he
has cured some sixty or seventy out of about one hundred and twenty
patients of this description, for whom he has been called to prescribe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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