WHEN the German physicians (in the fifteenth century) wished to bring on a febrile action, they placed the patient between two fires.-Ibid. vol. 2, p. 478. AVICENNA held that a certain fifth quality formed the temperament.—Ibid. vol. 3, p. 43. LUIS MERCADO, physician to Philip II. doubted whether the temperament ought to be so regarded, or whether it were not rather the harmony and reunion of the four primary qualities.-Ibid. p. 21. SPRENGEL calls him the Thomas Aquinas of medicine, the first of all scholastic physicians; and says it is impossible to imagine "jusqu'à quel point cet écrivain pousse les réveries méthodiques." BARBAROSSA Communicated to Francis I. a receipt for mercurial pills.-Ibid. vol. 3, p. 73. THE old system, that the animal spirits were secreted by the brain.-Ibid. vol. 4, p. 64. All our knowledge comes to the same thing under different terms, pretty much. TEA brought into use by the Dutch merchants and physicians aiding each other.— Ibid. vol. 5, p. 106-8-11. NICHOLAS ROBINSON insisted that no other science had such incontestible pretensions to certitude as that of medicine.-Ibid. vol. 5, p. 171. THE apothecary's praise of a physician in Molière, "C'est un homme qui sait la medicine à fond, et qui, quand on devroit créver, ne démordroit pas, d'un iota, des régles des anciens. Oui, il suit toujours le grand chemin, le grand chemin; et pour tout l'or du monde, il ne voudroit pas avoir gúeri une personne avec d'autres remèdes que ceux que la Faculté permet."—M. DE POURCEAUGNAC, vol. 5, p. 387. "ON est bien aise au moins d'être mort méthodiquement :— ἢ πρὸς ἰατρῶ σοφ θροεῖν ἐπῳδὰς πρὸς τομῶντι πήματι." Sorн. Ajax. v. 582. In the atheistic work called, Man a Machine, by St. M. d'Argens (or Mr. de la Mettrie!), the author says that philosophical physicians are the only persons who have explored and unravelled the labyrinth of man; the only ones who, in a philosophical contemplation of the soul, have surprised it in its misery and grandeur, without despising or idolizing it; and the only ones who have a right to speak on it.Monthly Review, vol. 1, p. 125. Descartes, he says, said that physic could change the mind and manners together with the body.—Ibid. p. 126. WILLIAM CLARKE, the ossified man, in the county of Cork.-Ibid. vol. 5, p. 280. WOOD-LICE, how to be taken.-Ibid. p. 381 "The best way is the swallowing them alive, which is very easily and conveniently done, for they naturally roll themselves up on being touched, and thus form a sort of smooth pill, which slips down the throat without being tasted. This is the securest way of having all their virtues. The next to this is the bruising them with wine, and taking the expression. If the patient cannot be prevailed with to take them any other way than in powder, the best method ever invented for preparing them in that form, is that ordered in the new London Dispensatory, which is the tying them up in a thin canvass cloth, and suspending them within a covered vessel, over the steam of hot spirit of wine; they are soon killed by it, and rendered friable." "Often of service in asthmas, and great good has been sometimes done by a long course of them, in disorders of the eyes." This is from Sir John Hill. "VIDES à medicis, quanquam in adversâ valetudine nihil servi ac liberi differant, mollius tamen liberos clementiusque tractari."-PLINY, 1. 8, Ep. 24. MUMMIES are known to be most sovereign and magistral in medicine.—JOHN GREGORY, p. 63. A FEVER cured by music. The cure is curious.-M. Review, vol. 9, p. 367-8. Ir is said of Archbishop Sheldon, that he offered £1000 to any person who would "help him to the gout, looking upon it as the only remedy for the distemper in his head, which he feared might in time prove an apoplexy; as in fine it did, and killed him."-DR. POPE's Life of SETH WARD, Restit. vol. 1, p. 52. DR. LISTER thought that the Small and great Pox were both first occasioned either by the bite, or by eating of some venomous creature.-M. Review, January 1754, p. 38. THEODORE ZUINGER of Basil, never took a fee except from the rich, who forced it He used to say, "when a pa upon him. tient cried ah! ah! for a physician to say da! da! was worthy only of a hangman or other executioner."-Zuinger, p. 2452. WHITE leprosy or elephantiasis; "A peculiar malady is this, and natural to the Egyptians; but look, when any of their kings fell into it, woe worth the subjects and poor people! for there were the tubs and bathing vessels, wherein they sate in the baine, filled with men's blood for their cure.”—PLINY, lib. 26, c. 1. Ph. Holland, vol. 2, p. 242. THE Galenists use to cure contraria contrariis with medicaments of a contrary temper; but the Paracelsists, similia similibus, making one dolour to expel another.-PurTENHAM, p. 39. "YOUR highness Shall from this practice but make hard your heart."-Cymbeline, act i. sc. vi. Kaempfer, vol. 1, p. 235. Taking the prescription itself in pills. ARISTOTLE is cited by Olympiodorus to have known a man who never slept in all his life. And the strangeness hath been quitted by an experience of later days.JOHN GREGORY, p. 63. THE principal ingredient of the weaponsalve is the moss of a dead man's skull, as the recipe delivered by Paracelsus to Maximilian the Emperor.-Ibid. p. 63. MR. VENN the elder, in the last six months of his life "was often upon the brink of the grave, and then unexpectedly restored. A medical friend, the late John Pearson, who frequently visited him at this time, observed that the near prospect of dissolution so elated his mind with joy, that it proved a stimulus to life. Upon one occasion, Mr. Venn himself remarked some fatal appear-¦ ances, exclaiming, Surely these are good symptoms!' Mr. Pearson replied, Sir, in this state of joyous excitement, you cannot live.'"-Memoir of MR. VENN, p. 59. AT Butterley Lees, near New Mills, on the 5th instant, as the wife of E. Fearnley was sealing up the cows, a favourite, which always appeared very quiet, turned her head, and dreadfully lacerated the left eye of the unfortunate woman. The sight of this eye Mrs. Fearnley had lost by the small pox in her childhood; but the obstruction being partly removed by the cow, and the other part by Mr. Burkinshaw, of York, she has actually recovered the sight of her eye which has so long been closed. She is in her forty-second year.-Tyne Mercury. serves, and such like Arabian medicinal compositions. It is at present become of universal and most noxious use. It fouls our animal juices, and produces scrophulas, scurvies, and other putrid disorders, by relaxing the solids: it occasions watery swellings, and catarrhal ails: it induces hysterics and other nervous disorders; therefore should be sparingly used, especially by the weaker sex; they are naturally of a fibra laxa."—M. Review, vol. 13, p. 272. MAISTRE DOUBLET, surgeon to the Due de Nemours :-he cured wounds with nothing but clean rags and clean water, with the help of charms.-See BRANTOME, vol. 9, p. 22-3. "THE Machaon of those times (A.d. 1754), Dr. Richard Rock, dispensed from his onehorse chaise his cathartic anti-venereal elec of vipers. Being superior to regularity, and despising the formality of academical degrees, he styled himself M. L. He is,” says the Connoisseur (No. 17)," a London physician, or as Molière would express it, 'C'est un medicin de Londres."" SHEBBEARE published, A.D. 1755, a "Practice of physic founded on principles in phy-tuary, his itch powder, and his quintessence siology and pathology hitherto unapplied in physical enquiries." The principle was fire, of which he held the real elementary and material existence, and the presence of which he considered to be the cause of animal heat; and its excess or defect the principal cause of all diseases. His directions are to heighten or abate the fire, which amounts to nothing more than the hot or cold regimen.-M. Review, 12, p. 401, which speaks ill of the author. M. REVIEW, Vol. 13, p. 242. Case of consumption cured by cucumbers. Dr. Gregory's case by lemons. Mr. Fletcher's own case by cherries. The two latter were indicated by a craving for these remedies. The former, the Dr. happened to think of. "As spirits (spiritus ardentes)," says Dr. Douglass's Circular, A. D. 1750,"not above a century ago, were used only as officinal cordials, but now are become an endemical plague every where, being a pernicious ingredient, in most of our beverages; so formerly sugar was only used in syrups, con “WHEN we see a snuff-coloured suit of ditto, with bolus buttons, a metal-headed cane, and an enormous bushy grizzle, we as readily know the bearer to be a dispenser of life and death, as if we had seen him pounding a mortar, or brandishing a clyster pipe."-Connoisseur, vol. 2, p. 161. a. d. 1755. HOPE that a physician affords : Δόξαν γὰρ τόδ' ὑγιείας ἔχει. "THE subtil medium proved: or that wonderful power of nature, so long ago conjectured by the most ancient and remarkable philosophers, which they called sometimes æther, but oftener elementary fire, verified. Shewing that all the distinguish ing and essential qualities ascribed to æther by them, and the most eminent modern philosophers, are to be found in electrical fire, and that too in the utmost degree of perfection. By R. Lovett, of the Catholic Church of Worcester. A.D. 1756."-Monthly Review, vol. 15, p. 561. PARACELSUS and Von Helmont : "These desperadoes freed medicine from the yoke of Galenism and the Arabians; and yet they did not point out the true path. All the vital and animal motions were explained by the furnace or alembic; and all diseases were supposed to arise either from acids or alkalies."-Ibid. vol. 16, p. 99. Bacon exprest himself strongly in favour of the Hippocratic method of case writing; but medicine was so divided by the schoolphysician and the chemist, that it made small advances.-Ibid. The next step was, that "acids alkal. ferments, precipitations," all fled before globules of such and such figure and magnitude. The circulation of the blood was made subservient to the laws of hydraulics; man became a mere mechanical structure, and diseases were proved to own the power of diagrams. Ibid. Sydenham, indeed, and some few others, kept to the old Hippocratic method of observation. At last Boerhaave, "that ornament of his profession and of his species," availing himself wisely of the ancient observations, of the chemical, anatomical, and mechanical discoveries; following none implicitly, and using each in its place; he set physiology and the observation of diseases on their proper basis.-Ibid. p. 100. pamphlet-shops are more reputable stages for such doctors as himself, than the posts and bye corners occupied by his redoubted rivals, Messrs. West, and Franks, and Rock, and all the rest of them.”—Ibid. vol. 16, p. 466. IN Birch's History of the Royal Society, it is said that the Finlanders recover persons who have been drowned two or three days; but the persons thus recovered almost always lose their vivacity, and their memory is much impaired.—Ibid. vol. 17, p. 209. A. D. 1758. DR. MACKENZIE'S History of Health.-Monthly Review, vol. 19, p. 476. "This author supposes that the Paradisiacal food was entirely vegetable. Indeed, the drudgery of providing culinary utensils, and of cookery, he thinks inconsistent with the state in Paradise.. But, he observes, fruits are cold and little nutritive; seeds without preparation, hard of digestion, and flatulent; and undressed herbs, still more harsh and crude. He therefore ingeniously, and not unphysically (says the Reviewer) imagines that the tree of life (which was not interdicted to Adam and Eve, which it seems therefore rather absurd to think they never used, and which was pregnant with immortality itself,) must have been intended to prevent, or remove, the inconvenience resulting from the insalubrity of their common diet. "For Dr. Clarke (vol. 8, sermon 4,) says, Adam was not (as some have, without any ground from Scripture, imagined) created actually immortal; but by the use of the tree of life (whatever is implied under that expression), he was to have been preserved from dying. This tree, Dr. Mackenzie chuses to understand in a material physical sense, to the possibility of which, we conceive a capacious (?) physician may easily subscribe. "And the original efficacy of this divine and sole panacea our learned author thinks alluded to by St. John in the Apocalypse, chap. 22, v. 2. Institutes of health. "Salt and sugar are to be totally rejected, with all compositions into which they enter. Milk to be avoided, for a disease; who suppose that any man, from the creation of the world, ever died of a fever; who believe that fevers are not always symptomatical. Ibid. p. 100. FRANCISCUS DU PORT de signis Morborum, lib. 4, edited by SCHOMBERG, 4to. 28. A sort of Busbeian medical grammar in hexameters. BAD physicians purged and vomited in the next world.-BERTUCCI, Viaggio al Sommo Bene, p. 42. Monthly Review, vol. 47, p. 29. RICKETS in sheep, a disease then (A.D. 1772) about forty years' standing in England. The cause ascertained by dissection, to be a maggot in the brain, about one-quarter of an inch long, and of a brownish colour. Ibid. vol. 48, p. 562. A MAN in Mexico paralytic in both arms, perfectly restored by being struck with lightning, which for a while deprived him of his senses. Ibid. vol. 49, p. 127. “MR. KIRKLAND'S tremendous scheme of extinguishing fevers, by boldly drenching the patient both externally and internally with cold water." Ibid.-ARMSTRONG,in his Medical Essays, says that corns are sprouts of the rheumatism, and not the offspring of mere pressure. PROOF that inoculation leads to idolatry. with but few exceptions." These few, per--Monthly Review, vol. 50, p. 71. Ibid. vol. 34, p. 30, Physiological Re searches. The author vents his indignation against the ignorance of those who mistake a fever IN the memorandum of the Society for restoring drowned persons at Amsterdam, vol. 2, part 1, A. D. 1774, the thirty-sixth case is of a man who, in the middle of January, and in a state of drunkenness, fell into the water, and remained in it an hour and a quarter. He was stiff when taken out, but in two hours gave signs of life, and in two more, walked home.—Ibid. vol. 51, p. 556. |