Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. HISTORICAL SKETCH AS TO THE NATURE AND TREATMENT OF PHTHISIS. We do not purpose in the following sketch of the opinions which have been hitherto held respecting phthisis, to enter into large detail, but we desire rather to trace the changes of opinion or the additions to the knowledge of the disease which have occurred in large feras of medical history, with a view to show the real amount of progress which, has been made since the days of the earliest records of our art. This may be in part effected by the aid of the labours of Dr. Young, to whom the profession is indebted for abstracts of the works of nearly all preceding writers on consumption— accurate, no doubt, and arranged in chronological order, but having the great defect of an absence of scientific arrangement in the direction of the present inquiry, and being consequently of comparatively little value except to the most painstaking medical reader. We think that it will suffice for our purpose if we state in a few words the opinions which were held by the ancient physicians to the time of Galen, those found in the works of the Arabian physicians and the physicians of the middle ages, and lastly, give a shortanalysis of the views held by the moderns since the. sixteenth century; and since the advance of knowledge during those periods has not been very great, we shall avoid wearying the reader by multiplying quotations. The leading characteristics of these aeras in the knowledge of the disease may be thus epitomised. The ancients confounded phthisis with other diseases, both of the lungs and other organs, attended by wasting, but were yet well acquainted with the disease as we see it at this day. The Arabian physicians and those of the middle ages adhered to the opinion of Hippocrates and Galen, and adv...