Excerpt from On the Present State of Therapeutics: With Some Suggestions for Placing It Upon a More Scientific Basis T first sight, it would seem to. Be an easy matter to settle the question of the efficacy of medical treatment. The medicines employed, as well as the progress of the disease after their administration, are known; but unfortunately it must be admitted, that to appreciate correctly the value Of any plan Of treatment, is one of the most difficult problems of practical medicine. The history of our art is but one long proof, so to Speak, of the truth of this statement and I may say that even at the present day, although the difficulties of such investi gations have been lessened, every work on medical practice amply shows, that as yet' there is nothing fixed or stable in therapeutics. What is the cause of this absence of fixed principles in therapeutics It evidently arises from our erroneous opinions respecting the action of drugs - from ascribing to them pro perties which they do not possess. It would be of the utmost importance to be able to ascertain accurately the causes that have led to the adoption of these erroneous views. They are to be attributed partly, no doubt, to the inherent difficulties of pathological research; but far more, I think, to the defective and injudicious methods of investigation which medical men have employed, and especially to their having overlooked one or two important points, of which it is necessary to have a clear idea, in order to be able to estimate accurately the influence of treatment on disease. I shall briefly advert to some of these causes. It is evident that, in proportion as the diagnosis of disease was less understood, the possibility of confounding one diseased state with another must have been greater; and consequently, that Of attributing the cure of one disorder, instead of another, to the action of a given medicine. As it became better under stood, however, fewer mistakes of that kind would occur; and during the present century, this part of medicine has made such progress, that the chances of error from such a cause, as far as regards ordinary complaints, have been very much lessened, al though considerable obscurity still overhangs the diagnosis of those of the nervous system. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.