Excerpt from The American Eclectic Medical Review, Vol. 1: From June, 1866, to June, 1867 The position of eclectics is essentially what it has been since its introduction to the American people and the world. Theoretically and practically, we have rejected, and we do now reject, that wholesale bloodletting which has made up a large share of the treatment of allopathists in all acute diseases. Only a few years since, bloodletting was the rule with the thousands of physicians and writers of this country and of the fatherland. How foolish would any of us have been regarded, twenty years ago, if we had publicly pre dicted that in 1866, bloodletting would not be the general practice in fevers and infiammatiousl But we have kept our faith, our practice has proved itself the right practice, and allopathists themselves do not resort to bleeding in one tenth of the cases in which they formerly did. The teachers of allopathy, the professors in their colleges, still advocate this fatal barbarism, and their graduates far too frequently resort to it. But the common sense of the people, and the superior success of eclectic physicians, have brought the practice into disgraceful contempt, in the honest minds of the American people. Surely, this is a change and a tri umph! A change by which thousands of lives are saved every year, and a triumph to every eclectic who has been struggling for a right to live and to be honored through these twenty years past. And yet allopathic writers, when they prepare articles for their medical journals, or write works on the practice of medicine, like Dr. Flint, recommend bloodletting, though with much discrimination; and England and Scotland have many among her foremost men who hke J. Hughes Bennett, discard almost entirely the lancet. But the profes sors in the medical colleges of New York and Philadelphia the two great centres of medical education in this country all unite in recommending bloodletting; and their satellites, in all the allopathic medical chaim of the land, echo these sentiments from their halls of collegiate instruction. Take a' 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.