Health—Nature's Aids—Consumption
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HEALTH—NATURE'S AIDS—CONSUMPTION.
We have been looking over the last quarterly number of Dr. Dixon's Scalpel, and find the usual amount of zealous, hap-hazard, often sound, often heated and extreme, assertion, regarding the causes of disease and the means of health.1 We take it that Dr. D. wants to produce effects by strong means (not drugs, but terms)—but yet that he knows enough to perceive how poorly all those sweeping and arbitrary sentences of his must really stand, under the calm eye of the medical philosopher.
Of this number of the Scalpel, we transcribe the motto. We have given it once before, but it is good enough to bear repetition:
Nature is ever busy, by the silent operation of her own forces, endeavoring to cure disease. Her medicines are, air, warmth, light, food, water, exercise, and sleep. Their use is directed by instinct, and that man is most worthy the name of physicians, who most reveres its unerring laws.
One of the articles in the number is a queer theory of consumption,from which the reader would infer that, if he have a tendency to pulmonary disease, he had better go and get staving drunk!
Another article is on Tobacco, whose evils are set forth in almost indignant terms; but perhaps not a word too much or too bitter. It should be read by every young man in Brooklyn and New York.
Toward the last of the number we have a "Letter of advice to Consumptives," wherefrom we scizzorise the following:
Many consumptives are quacked to the verge of the grave in our cities and then sent South to die. Candidly let me tell you, my friends stay at home. There is no antidote to your dread disease here. The South has no specific atmosphere to cure you. The vapor of our sugar-kettles, so much vaunted as a cure, is of no more benefit than the vapor of a North river steamboat. Consumption exists here—begins and ends here, despite climate and saccharine evaporation. You have the means of cure at home. Not in the inhalation of the vapors of medical compounds of a new set of quacks, but in the natural aids to health and preventives of disease God has given you—water, air, and exercise.
Temporary relief is not cure, though all such cases are counted cures by this unscrupulous character. The winds grow keen, do not let them drive you into the house. Dress warm, take exercise, even at the risk of getting your nose frozen. Subscribe to some good journal of health, and follow its dictates if your find them good; expose any errors, if you find them in their advice, and trust to nature's remedies above all quacks and patent medicines.
Notes:
1. Edward H. Dixon (1808—1880), a doctor, was a leading sexual health physician and editor of The Scalpel, a medical journal. [back]