QUACKS and
GRAFTERS
By EX-OSTEOPATH
BEING AN EXPOSÉ OF THE STATE OF
THERAPEUTICS AT THE PRESENT TIME,
WITH SOME REASONS WHY SUCH
GRAFTERS FLOURISH, AND SUG-
GESTIONS TO REMEDY THE
DEPLORABLE MUDDLE
Published in the Year 1908 by
The Cincinnati Medical Book Company
Cincinnati Ohio
Copyrighted, 1908,
By The Cincinnati Medical Book Co.
The Lancet-Clinic Press,
Cincinnati, Ohio.
To the
GREAT AMERICAN PUBLIC
is Dedicated
This Book, With Every
Confidence in its Proverbial Common Sense and
Discrimination, and With the Hope of
Having Added a Mite Toward Greater
and Better Things in the
Art of Aesculapius.
PREFACE.
There has been but one other period in the history of medicine when somany systems of the healing art were in vogue. In the seventeenth century,during the Reform Period, following the many epoch-making discoveries, asthe blood and lymph circulation; when alchemy was abandoned and chemistrybecame a science; when Galileo regenerated physics, and zoology and botanywere largely extended; when Newton enunciated the laws of gravitation;when cinchona bark, the great febrifuge, was introduced into Europe, andthe cell doctrine was founded by Hooke, Malpighi and Grew, the oldHippocratic, Galenic and Arabic systems of medicine were undermined. Inthat transition period, when the medical profession was trying to adjustits practice with the many new theories, its authoritative voice was lost,and in the struggle for something tangible, innumerable new systems sprangup.
Four systems stood out most prominently—the pietistically coloredParacelsism of Von Helmont, with its sal, sulphur and mercury; thechemical system of Sylvius and Willis, with its acid and alkali theory ofcause and cure of disease; the iatro-chemical system, with itsfermentation theory; and the iatro-physical system, which contended thathealth was dependent upon proper adjustment of physical and mechanicalarrangements of the body. The old humoral theory[Pg 6] of Galen had itsadherents, influencing all of the newer systems. And suggestivetherapeutics was rampant in most grotesque and fanciful forms. Witchcraft,superstition and cabalism were fostered even at the various Europeancourts. As Roswell Park says in his History of Medicine: “With delightfulsatire Harvey divided the physicians of the day into six classes—theFerrea, Asinaria, Jesuitica, Aquaria, Laniaria and Stercoraria—accordingas their favorite systems of treatment were the administration of iron,asses’ milk, cinchona, mineral water, venesection or purgatives.”
That history repeats itself is a truism well illustrated in medicineto-day. The new cellular pathology, founded by Virchow and Cohnheim andelaborated by innumerable men since; the discovery of parasitism and thegerm theory by Davaine, Pasteur and Koch; antisepsis by Lister; theintroduction of anesthesia by Morton, Simpson and Koller; the application