The Hastings Standard Published Daily. MONDAY, JAN. 18, 1897. MEDICAL TREATMENT AND CURE OF DISEASE.

Hastings Standard, Issue 223, 18 January 1897, Page 2

The Hastings Standard Published Daily.

MONDAY, JAN. 18, 1897. MEDICAL TREATMENT AND CURE OF DISEASE.

For the cause that lacks assistance, For the wrongs that need resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that we can do.

It seem strange that at the end of the l'Jth century medical journals should be discussing the question of whether, in the use of medicine for the cure of disease, modern physicians have advanced any during the last 100 years. Medical men admit that surgery has made wonderful strides during that that time ; but the camp is divided on the other question. According to an article in a recent number of the New Review, Hippocrates, the father of medicine, who tlourished somewhere about 122 li.C'., has given us descriptions of diseases and injuries so accurate and complete that little can be altered or added in the present day. The writer of the article compares very clearly and interestingly the modern school with the ancient. Hippocrates was very crude i in his treatment of disease. Hf took it that in the body there w.re four humors —black bile, yellow bill-, blood, and phlegm —and that diseases arose out >f the excels or deficiency or misproportion of these, and lie attempted to cure by bringing these elements to their proportion. From this arose tho practice of blood letting. The writer goes on to state that the advance in surgery in the last quarter of a century has amounted to a total revolution. Lister s discovery of the antiseptic method of treating wounds, running parallel with the discovery of amesthetics, has enabled surgeons to perform —and perform successfully—operations that were deemed impossible '2O or »0 years since, the most [ remarkable probably being ' u ftbdouiux&l surgery, by whicb tumors j

formerly believed to be incurable are successfully removed. Massing on to the department of medicine, it is shown that the advances made have been mostly in the way of discovery of specific remedies for particular diseases. There are two methods of dealing with disease ; one is to cure it, to cut its natural coiu*se short; the other, by treatment—the management, by what are called rational indications, of a disease for which there is no known cure. The cure of ague by quinine may be taken as an example of the former; the treatment of typhus or typhoid, of the latter. It is hardly necessary to dwell on the superiority of one method over the other. No one would think of treating ague when its cure could be effected by the specifics at hand. The question is cannot specifics be found for diseases which have hitherto been regarded as impossible to cure and capable only of treatment ? Take the diseases of hydrophobia, diphtheria and cholera. Why cannot these be cured ? Modern science has given us an answer in the case of two of them. Pasteur's innoculations of a modified and very much attenuated dilution of the poison taken from a hydrophobic animal have been recognised as a specific for the cure of rabies. The antitoxin treatment of diptheria discovered by Dr Behrens, of Berlin—is on the same lines as the cure of smallpox by vaccination, and the cure of hydrophobia by a modified form of the poison of rabies. In this case diphtheria bacillus is injected into a horse, and the animal is bled, the serum of his blood being injected into the patient. The opinion is now being generally formed that in the anti-toxin serum we possess a remedy of distinctly greater value in the treatment of diphtheria than any other with which we are acquainted. Cannot cholera likewise be cured ? The writer enters into a serious discussion of the question, and mentions instances in which cholera has been positively cured by inoculation with cobra venom. His final conclusions are : " Evidence is rapidly accumulating that eve long other diseases, equal in deadliness to those already mentioned, will be amenable to cure by the same means. Cancer, typhoid, pnevunonia, epidemic, cholera, etc., have all been successfully treated by cultures of their respective poisons, and apparently with marked success, but we must wait for further and more exact data with regard to these before w r e can positively decide on their merits."