Table Of ContentTHE PHILOSOPHY
— OF —
PHYSIOMEDICALISM
ITS THEOREM, COROLLARY, AND LAWS OF APPLICATION
FOR THE CURE OF DISEASE
BY
J. M. THURSTON, M. D.,
PROFESSOR OF NERVOUS AND MENTAL DISEA SES
PHYSIOMEDICAL COLLEGE OF INDIANA
INDIANAPOLIS
BEING A PLEA FOR A MORE EXALTED IDEA OF THE
VITAL INTEGRITY OF THE HUMAN ORGANISM
AND A HIGHER MEDICAL EDUCATION
WITH MANY COLORED ILLUSTRATIONS
AND SIX ANALYTIC TABLES IN COLORS
RICHMOND, INDIANA
NICHOLSON PRINTING & MFG. CO.
1900
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1900,
by J. M. THURSTON, M. D., in the office of the
Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
To my Friend and Comrade,
Reverend Jackson E. Webster,
Whose brotherly love and comradeship for more than thirty-five years, since we
both laid aside our soldier's uniform for the duties of civil life, has ever
been true and helpful as we have, though on different lines,
touched shoulders in the service of humanity's weal,
This Book
is
Respectfully Dedicated.
Preface.
This book is an earnest effort to systematize and logically correlate the
principles and theories of Physiomedicalism, and the abstract truths of medicine
as known and understood to-day, so as to enable the student to clearly
comprehend them, and the practitioner to carry them into bedside practice. How
far I have succeeded in this, of course the readers must decide. Certainly I feel
as keenly the great disproportion between the task of thus dealing with, what
seems to me, the most profound medical philosophy in the world, and my
personal ability to successfully accomplish the same, as my most adverse critics
would care to express. Only the liberty I felt of drawing upon the extensive
fragmentary literature on the subject in hand, found in journal articles and
society papers, together with the valuable text-books of Curtis, Cook, Redding,
Lyle, and others, coupled with the fact of an urgent need of a concise and
complete exposition of Physiomedicalism, has given me courage for this
arduous undertaking.
In this connection I must acknowledge my indebtedness to the foremost living
teachers of this philosophy, viz.: Professors George Hasty, William Tait, E.
Anthony, H. J. Treat, C. T. Bedford and J. Redding, for the groundwork,
furnished in their lectures and writings, of many valuable ideas in the
construction of this work; and our noble dead - Alva Curtis, William H. Cook,
S. E. Carey, G. N. Davidson - from whose teachings my first conceptions of
Physiomedicalism were derived, whose grand lives of untiring labor and
unstinted sacrifice shall ever stand as stately examples to the coming
profession, to elevate and ennoble our science. To the teaching and practical
exemplification of these splendid lives, I owe all that I may have achieved.
6 The Philosophy of Physiomedicalism.
Should this book be favored with readers educated in another system of
medicine, I speak for the profession in assuring you that we claim no exclusive
rights to Physiomedical Philosophy, or its practice; there can be no patent on
truth, and we place no embargo on whatever of scientific and practical aids it
may contain, but bid you welcome to, and God-speed in the use of any and all
that you may find in these pages that will aid you in the relief and cure of
suffering humanity. The earnest, honest physician can apply the practical truths
of Physiomedical Philosophy in the healing of the sick, no matter what school
of medicine he may happen to affiliate with. All we ask is proper credit for
whatever of science and truth we may have developed.
In accordance with advanced methods of our English word-construction, I have
taken the liberty to omit the hyphen in the word “Physiomedical,” throughout
this work, believing it not only shortens the word, but gives it a more composite
significance.
To Hugo P. Thieme, Ph. D., of the University of Michigan, I am much indebted
for valuable services in proof corrections.
I am under many obligations to E. V. Brower, M. D., of Richmond, Indiana,
who has rendered it possible to put this book in press much earlier than I could
otherwise have done.
Richmond, Indiana, January, 1900.
Introductory.
The new century brings a spirit of unrest along the line of general education,
which is none the less apparent in the dissatisfaction of advanced minds with
even our most progressive notions of medicine. Faith in traditional medicine
has long since waned with the abandoned blood-letting, ad libitum doses of
calomel, etc. The antiseptic idea has advanced surgery beyond mechanical
expertness and art, closely approaching a true science. Yet, notwithstanding, the
observant readily discerns disquietude under sectarian restraint of “regularism”
in medicine, a heresy in therapeutic certainty, and a broadening of heretofore
proscriptive materia medica, together with a growing realization of the
necessity of a medical philosophy as a basis of medical education and practice,
instead of that empirical idea of “traditions” and “accumulated experience of
the profession.”
The candid seeker after absolute medical truth, and a system whose bedside
application yields unerring results, cannot but deeply regret the total absence, in
the Old School or “Regular” medicine, of a basic hypothesis, or fundamental
principles of philosophical reasoning, around which the vast and almost chaotic
mass of empirical, or purely experimental facts may be grouped into a
harmonious system of scientific medicine. The sore need of such a medical
philosophy is exhibited in the continual train of meteoric experimental
achievements, that flash athwart the medical horizon and sink into oblivion -
Brown-Sequard’s “Elixir of Life”; Koch’s Tuberculine, the promised panacea
for our vast army of consumptives; Pasteur’s Antitoxine, to eradicate
childhood’s most relentless scourge, diphtheria. All these, seeming so
scientifically and unerringly evolved from the experimental laboratory, and so
fraught with promises of glad tidings of great joy to afflicted humanity,
8 The Philosophy of Physiomedicalism.
only to prove dismal failures at the bedside! Nay, worse than failures, because
they are founded on the false dogma of creating one disease to cure another
disease - allos pathos. Had these brilliant and painstaking experimenters lifted
their energies from out the laboratory, to nature’s unerring operations in the
vital activities of the physiological whole, and reasoned that, in introducing into
the blood current of a consumptive the putrescent sputa from another
consumptive, modified by spending its virulency apace upon guinea pigs; or,
injecting diphtheria poison from a case of diphtheria, tamed slightly by
invading the blood of a horse, into another diphtheria patient, was directly
opposed to every known law of Biology and Physiology; and the slight benefit
that might accrue by this rude invasion of the vital sanctuary, would be
counterbalanced by a huge sum of evil to the physiological integrity of the
organism, they would no doubt have spent those long hours of patient research
to much better advantage on more rational lines.
Again, the promises of clinical medicine, with its vast accumulated mass of
experimental therapeutic observations, has signally failed to give us even an
approach to precision in therapeutic effect; because we have simply an
aggregation of abstract facts without syllogistic continuity, being devoid of
legitimate premise in physiological truisms. As, also, the resort to chemical
philosophy, endeavoring to frame a chemico-therapy, in other words, assuming
that the functional activities of the organism are due to chemical disintegration
of the tissues, and on this false premise, reasoning that medicines act by
chemical equations, giving in some unknowable way a functional result, if
given by formulae, analagous to the synthetic results obtained in retorts and test
tubes.
Lastly, the germ theory of disease-causation, and antiseptic surgery, though
within a decade passing the excitement of novelty, regression, progression, and
final recognition, with many doubts and qualifications by the medical laity, is
still in a state of uncertainty, grievous to its ardent advocates, all of which is
due to that same lack of a working hypothesis founded on immutable laws of
Physiology,
Introductory. 9
that shall embrace and harmonize the entire domain of functional expressions in
every organized being from monad up to man. Until this, the only basis of an
exact science of medicine, is adopted as the foundation for its medical
superstructure, the “Regular” school, with all its vaunted progress and advanced
methods, will ever remain a splendid conglomerate of experimental concrete
facts, and their therapeutics an aimless empirical application of agents
according to formulae, and clinical traditions; the same agent at one time being
a virulent poison, at another a “blessed medicine,” according to quantity and
conditions, things that the physician can never absolutely control.
Added to the above incubus on higher medical education, is that unfortunate
idea that all lines of medical thought, pioneering, development and progress,
should be dogmatical and exclusive. In other words, that all medical hypotheses
and medical schools should be obliterated (except one, the “Regular”), and that
medical men should travel single file in one narrow pathway, cut on a sectarian
line through the forest of medical superstition, ignorance, and bigotry. So long
as medicine remains without the pale of exact sciences, which it must until a
broad and rational hypothesis is accepted by all, there will of necessity be
different schools of medicine, and there will ever be different sects and
followings in any school of medicine, because there will always be certain
unknown and unknowable phenomena in the manifestations of that mysterious
Vital force, of whose essential nature and identity we can know nothing, it
being immaterial to our material means and methods of investigation. How
narrow and unprogressive, then, to lay an embargo on higher education and
medical progress, prohibiting medical pioneering in divergent lines of thought
and investigation, demanding annihilation of schools and sects.
On the other hand, we have in the Homeopathic and Eclectic schools of
medicine, examples of a too narrow hypothesis. The Homeopathic system is
founded on the exclusive dogma of “Similia similibus curantur.” Its hypothesis
formulated, is, that because
10 The Philosophy of Physiomedicalism.
certain substances produce derangements of the body-functions as manifest by a
complex of symptoms, therefore they will correct a complex of symptoms
produced by other substances or influences closely resembling that caused by
the remedy; provided, however, that the proposed remedy be given in
exceedingly minute doses, highly diluted. Rigidly carried out on this
hypothesis, the Homeopathic materia medica soon became loaded with agents
most virulently opposed to the normal life manifestations, and consequently
valuable for their pathological potentiality, as the greater the number and
severity of symptoms a substance could cause in the human organism, the
greater its ability to overpower those of the disease-causation; and their text-
books presented sad evidence of erroneous premises in a ridiculous list of
medicines, prominent among which were snake-poison, bed-bugs, spiders, and
honey-bees. (See Hull’s Jahr, pp. 542, 593, 621, 763, articles Crotalus,
Rattlesnake-poison; Cimex Lectularius, common Bed-Bug; Diadem Arena,
Papal Cross Spider; Lachesis, Virus of the Lance-headed Serpent.) But we must
give the Homeopathic system full credit with not only its magnificent
pioneering in medical progress, demonstrating the inherent vital resistance of
the organism to large and virulent doses of medicine, but their principles of
therapeutics and materia medica have kept such pace with progressive medicine
that Similia similibus curantur is now little more than a banner decoration.
The Eclectic school, like the “Regular,” attempts to avoid a dogma, but in so
doing has swung tangential beyond all sectarian restraints, to a general piracy
upon the belongings of other medical schools. The eclectic idea - for it cannot
be called an hypothesis, and is too narrow to be even dignified with the term
dogma - is, without leave or license, to raid the materia medica of all other
schools, and select the best therefrom as their remedial armamentarium. But the
result, now apparent in the decimated ranks of Eclectic practitioners, fully
demonstrates that it is simply impossible to make a systematic selection of the
best from other schools of medicine, and maintain an integral Sect, without a
working hypothesis,
Introductory. 11
or medical philosophy. The popularity of this school of medicine, for a time,
was because of a dire need of radical reform in the Old School of practice, and
the bright promise it gave of this reformation. But an impartial bedside test has
shown it deficient; and its popularity has greatly lapsed in the last two decades,
while the “Regulars” have quietly gathered up the essential truths, incorporating
them into their own practice, by the magic word “Officinal.” And there now
remains little else to identify the Eclectic school except its empty title.
The essential cause of failure in these schools of medicine to fill the
requirements of an exact medical science, and call to their ranks the largest
following, as well as the acknowledged inability of even advanced Old School
or “Regular” practice to meet the demands of an exact science of medicine, is
all due, we contend, to two causes, namely: First, the absence of a correct and
broad-working hypothesis upon which to build a logical philosophy and definite
practice of medicine; second, and as a sequence, their failure to recognize the
human organism as an essentially Vital domain, and not a machine, subject to
the whims and happenings of physical, chemical, electrical, any or all of the
blind forces for its functional manifestations and organic operations in health or
disease.
No science has yet been established except through the evolving of an
essentially correct and comprehensive hypothesis, and correlative philosophy.
Substantial progress in the development of any of the established sciences of to-
day had been impossible until a working hypothesis was evolved, broadly based
upon universal truths, and comprehensive enough to harmonize all known facts
along certain correlated lines. Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Wren, Halley, Hooke,
and Huygens had successfully discovered and demonstrated nearly all the laws
promulgated in Newton’s Principia, he adding little more than that of gravity.
But astronomy was, as yet, by no means a science: it was a mass of facts and
theories in a chaotic state, its votaries distracted by conflicting theories, and
contending sects. But the moment Newton promulgated his hypothesis of the
