— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letter to Mrs S. C. from Adrianople, 1717.
The children or young patients play together all the rest of
the day, and are in perfect health to the eighth. Then the fever begins to seize
them, and they keep their beds two days, very seldom three. They have very rarely
above twenty or thirty in their faces, which never mark, and in eight days time
they are as well as before their illness.
It is inadvertently affirmed in the Christian countries of Europe
that the English are fools and madmen. Fools, because they give their children the
small-pox to prevent their catching it; and madmen, because they wantonly communicate
a certain and dreadful distemper to their children, merely to prevent an uncertain
evil. The English, on the other side, call the rest of the Europeans cowardly and
unnatural. Cowardly, because they are afraid of putting their children to a little
pain; unnatural, because they expose them to die one time or other of the small-pox.
— Voltaire (François Marie Arouet) Letters
on England, 1731 (English edition 1733).
The moment this princess heard of inoculation, she caused an
experiment of it to be made on four criminals sentenced to die, and by that means
preserved their lives doubly; for she not only saved them from the gallows, but
by means of this artificial small-pox prevented their ever having that distemper
in a natural way, with which they would very probably have been attacked one time
or other, and might have died of in a more advanced age.
— Voltaire (François Marie Arouet) Letters
on England, 1731 (English edition 1733).
One might, of course, have tried experiments on a rabbit first,
and some work had been done along those lines; but it is difficult to be sure how
a rabbit feels at any time … most rabbits get frightened, and to do the sort of
things to a dog that one does to the average medical student requires a licence
signed in triplicate by two archbishops, as far as I can remember.
— J. B. S. Haldane, On Being One's own Rabbit.
One of the most elegant writers of the day, for example, bitterly
and satirically defines medicine to be the practice of pouring substances of which
nothing is known, into bodies of which still less is known.
— Chambers' Journal, 1836.
Take of a healthy male young child's water, fine treacle and
aniseed water, of each a like quantity, mingle them, and give about a quarter of
a pint or a little more at a time of it to the patient in the morning fasting, for
three mornings altogether; this hath cured many.
— A brief collection of many rare secrets,
Edward Fountaine (1650).
[For Breast cancer] Take of the Warts that grow on the hinder
Legs of a (Stone) Horse, dry them gently, till you can reduce them to a Powder,
of which you may give half a Dram for a Dose in any convenient Vehicle.
— Robert Boyle, Medicinal Experiments: or,
a collection of choice and safe remedies, 1696, vol II, 64.
… deaths from pulmonary tuberculosis from 1850 onwards … fell
slowly but steadily from then until 1950. Then, with the widespread use of potent
chemotherapy, there was a great acceleration in the fall of mortality… Once an effective
treatment had been discovered, its results were immediately apparent. The slow improvement
over the previous hundred years was no more than a reflection of the rising standard
of living.
— Macfarlane Burnet, Dominant Mammal,
Heinemann 1970, 104.
The most efficacious remedies for this kind of consumption are,
turpentine, capivi balsam, myrrh, Iceland moss, the tar fumigation, Prussic acid,
and Godbold's balsam. Godbold's balsam is well known to be a nostrum, but as the
present author has been convinced of its having effected some remarkable cures,
and has employed it in his own practice with great advantage, he must consider it
as a valuable medicine in catarrhal phthisis. It probably contains prussic acid,
to which I suppose much of its usefulness is owing.
— Thomas John Graham, Modern Domestic Medicine,
2nd edition, 1827, 243.
… although there are no men whose employment is more laborious,
or who are subjected to more sudden alternations of heat and cold, than those employed
in gas-manufactories, who inhale the carburetted gases in an impure state; yet these
men possess a larger share of health than many of the same grade in society, whose
occupations require a less amount of physical exertion, and who are not exposed
to such extreme changes of temperature.
The inhaling by the patient, (a female) of a mixture composed
of equal quantities of perfectly purified coal-gas and atmospheric air, was successfully
tried by Dr. Clanny in a case of Phthisis Pulmonalis, or consumption. The Doctor
first tried the effects of this mixture by inhaling it "very freely" himself;
and he found that no inconvenience whatever resulted from it.
— 'The Gas-Light Company', The Colonist
(Sydney), Thursday 31 December 1840, 2.
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