[p. 61]cines which they give are drastic purgatives, with whey,
and milk at certain times. If, indeed, these remedies had been good
and suitable to the complaints in which they are recommended, they
would have been still more deserving of recommendation, if, while
few in number, they were sufficient; but this is by no means the case.
Those, indeed, who have remodeled these "Sentences" have treated of
the remedies applicable in each complaint more in a medical fashion.
But neither have the ancients written anything worth regimen, although
this be a great omission. Some of them, indeed, were not ignorant
of the many varieties of each complaint, and their manifold divisions,
but when they wish to tell clearly the numbers (species?) of each
disease they do not write for their species would be almost innumerable
if every symptom experienced by the patients were held to constitute
a disease, and receive a different name.
PART 2
For my part, I approve of paying attention to everything relating
to the art, and that those things which can be done well or properly
should all be done properly; such as can be quickly done should be
done quickly; such as can be neatly done should be done neatly; such
operations as can be performed without pain should be done with the
least possible pain; and that all other things of the like kind should
be done better than they could be managed by the attendants. But I
would more especially commend the physician who, in acute diseases,
by which the bulk of mankind are cut off, conducts the treatment better
than others. Acute diseases are those which the ancients named pleurisy,
pneumonia, phrenitis, lethargy, causus, and the other diseases allied
to these, including the continual fevers. For, unless when some general
form of pestilential disease is epidemic, and diseases are sporadic
and [not] of a similar character, there are more deaths from these
diseases than from all the others taken together. The vulgar, indeed,
do not recognize the difference between such physicians and their
common attendants, and are rather disposed to commend and censure
extraordinary remedies. This, then, is a great proof that the common
people are most incompetent, of themselves, to form a judgment how
such diseases should be treated: since persons who are not physicians
pass for physicians
|
