Ruoff's Repertory of Homoeopathic Medicine

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: which Homoeopathic remedies are believed to act, I shall present the reader with a brief but comprehensive review of medicine, both ancient and modern. A glance at the history of medicine will show that its limited progress has been owing more to the defective method in which it has been studied than to...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: which Homoeopathic remedies are believed to act, I shall present the reader with a brief but comprehensive review of medicine, both ancient and modern. A glance at the history of medicine will show that its limited progress has been owing more to the defective method in which it has been studied than to any inherent complexity in the subject itself. In its origin the practice must necessarily have been in the highest degree empirical. Empiricism, therefore, is as old as the world, and will, judging from the past as well as the present, last as long. As the intellect of man became cultivated, he indulged in vague speculations concerning the phenomena about him, and hence medical philosophers turned their attention to the invention of medical hypotheses, moulded according to the prevailing notions of their day. Even Hippocrates himself was not free from the danger of hypothetical speculation, and laid the foundation for the grossest system of humoral pathology. Galen, whose medical doctrines held a despotic sway over the minds of physicians for 1400 years, based his therapeutics upon the purely arbitrary assumption of the ancient philosophers, that fire, air, earth and WAter, constituted the elementary principles of the universe. By means of these the elements of disease were experienced; and the curative effects of medicine were to be sought for upon the principle, contraria eonlrariis curanlur. The cultivation of chemistry occasioned by the researches of the Alchymists, gave a severe shock to the learning of the schools. About the same time Paracelsus made a vigorous attack upon the Galenical dogmas, which tended to dissipate the darkness of fourteen centuries. Though he exposed the errors of his predecessors, he had not the talent or good fortune to produce much ad...