Lectures on the ordinary agents of life : as applicable to therapeutics and hygiene, or, the uses of the atmosphere, habitations, baths, clothing, climate, exercise, foods, drinks, &c. in the treatment and prevention of disease / by Alexander Kilgour, M.D.

  • Kilgour, Alexander, 1803-1874.
Date:
1834
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on the ordinary agents of life : as applicable to therapeutics and hygiene, or, the uses of the atmosphere, habitations, baths, clothing, climate, exercise, foods, drinks, &c. in the treatment and prevention of disease / by Alexander Kilgour, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    of the instrument. Whilst they play upon their own bodies, however, though they may sometimes annoy us when they get us within their hearing ; yet, upon the whole, they are only tormenting or injuring themselves, and therefore they may pore over the books on Indigestion, Diseases of the Stomach, Diet, &c. which are the Introductions, the First Lessons/' the Vade Mecums, to such music, as long as they please: but the case becomes much worse when they set a-practising on the healthy, the young, and the unresisting, on the authority of a Domestic Medicine. Although, therefore, I consider that the attempt to make the curing of disease a popular science, is attended with more bad effects than can be counterbalanced by any good, I have not the same opinion with regard to Hygiene, or the preserving of the health. Richerand, whilst he strongly condemns the attempts to convert medicine into a Domestic Art, allows that those who have laid themselves out for this duty might have been of some service, if they had confined themselves to the Preservative. (Des Erreurs Populairesre- latives a la Medicine, p. 370.) The papa who reads a Do- mestic Medicine, and doses his son with Physic whom he has previously stuffed with roast beef and fat pudding; and the mamma who binds her daughter in tight stays from her earliest infancy, and sends her to a fashionable boarding school to sit sixteen hours out of the four and twenty in the acquisition of accomplishments, and then lays her on her back for years at the suggestion of some Spine Doctor, begin their