The Story of our Health Message

The Typical Treatment

A physician who wrote in 1858 of conditions within the period of his own memory says of the popular methods of medical practice: SHM 15.4

“Confinement by disease, which might have terminated in a few days, was protracted to weeks and months, because the importance of the case, as it was thought, required that the patient should be artificially ‘taken down,’ and then artificially ‘built up.’ SHM 15.5

“When carried to its ‘heroic’ extent, artificial medicine undermined the strength, elicited new morbid manifestations, and left more disease than it took away. The question raised was not how much the patient had profited under his active treatment, but how much more of the same he could bear. Large doses of violent and deleterious drugs were given as long as the patient evinced a tolerance of them, that is, did not sink under them. The results of such cases, if favorable, like the escapes of the desperate surgery, were chronicled as professional triumphs, while the press was silent on the disastrous results subsequently incurred in like cases by deluded imitators. SHM 16.1

“If diseases proved fatal, or even if they were not jugulated, or cut short at the outset, the misfortune was attributed to the circumstances of the remedies not being sufficiently active, or of the physician not being called in season. So great at one time, and that not long ago, was the ascendancy of heroic teachers and writers that few medical men had the courage to incur the responsibility of omitting the more active modes of treatment which were deemed indispensable to the safety of the patient.”—Jacob Bigelow, M.D., Brief Exposition of Rational Medicine, 62, 63. Boston: Philips, Samson, and Co., 1858. SHM 16.2

By the middle of the century voices of reform began to be heard among progressive members of the medical profession. In 1846 Sir John Forbes, editor of the British and Foreign Medical Review, wrote a stirring editorial under the title of “Young Physic,” in which he sounded a clarion call for substituting natural remedies for the popular methods of drugging. In a concluding summary of his objectives he announced as one of his purposes: SHM 16.3

“To endeavor to banish from the treatment of acute and dangerous diseases at least, the ancient axiom, melius anceps remedium quam nullam (a doubtful remedy is better than none), and to substitute in its place the safer and wiser dogma that when we are not certain of an indication, we should give nature the best chance of doing the work herself, by leaving her operations undisturbed by those of art.” SHM 16.4