The
combinations, too, of these symptoms are so infinitely diversified,
that many associations of them appear too rarely to establish a definite
disease: and to an unknown disease, there cannot be a known remedy.
Here, then, the judicious, the moral, the humane physician should stop.
Having been so often a witness to the salutary efforts which nature
makes to re-establish the disordered functions, he should rather trust
to their action, than hazard the interruption of that, and a greater
derangement of the system, by conjectural experiments on a machine so
complicated and so unknown as the human body, and a subject so sacred
as human life. Or, if the appearance of doing something be necessary to
keep alive the hope and spirits of the patient, it should be of the most
innocent character. One of the most successful physicians I have ever
known, has assured me, that he used more bread pills, drops of colored
water, and powders of hickory ashes, than of all other medicines put
together. It was certainly a pious fraud. But the adventurous physician
goes on, and substitutes presumption for knowledge. From the scanty
field of what is known, he launches into the boundless region of what
is unknown. He establishes for his guide some fanciful theory of
corpuscular attraction, of chemical agency, of mechanical powers, of
stimuli, of irritability accumulated or exhausted, of depletion by the
lancet, and repletion by mercury, or some other ingenious dream, which
lets him into all nature's secrets at short hand.
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