Vindication of the pre-eminent efficacy of manual operations in the cure of rheumatic and nervous diseases : against the malignant and unprincipled attempts of certain members of the medical profession to decry and obstruct the practice / by William Balfour.

Date:
1834
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vindication of the pre-eminent efficacy of manual operations in the cure of rheumatic and nervous diseases : against the malignant and unprincipled attempts of certain members of the medical profession to decry and obstruct the practice / by William Balfour. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    11/24 (page 11)
    That most excellent gentleman, George Baillie, of Jer- viswoode and Mellerstain, Esq., was, from an accident he met with, subjected to pain and lameness in his right knee- joint, for a period of fourteen years—during the whole of which time, he never had one night’s uninterrupted rest. He consulted many eminent men ; and, among the rest, Dr. Davis of London, who had adopted the practice which the late Mr. Grosvenor of Oxford introduced. He em- ployed women in the case, for a number of weeks. No cure, however, nor any thing like a cure, was effected, or ever could have been effected, by such means. Mr. Baillie subsequently came to me, and was completely and perma- nently cured by my hands, in little more than three months. Finding that I conducted the cure myself, without the intervention of subordinates, Mr. Baillie remarked, with the greatest complacency, “ My London doctors trusted my case entirely to women, desiring me to call on them (the doctors) once a week or so; but you operate with your own hands.”—“ If I did not,” I replied, “ you would leave Edinburgh, as you left London—you would remain uncured.” But let me not be understood as undervaluing either the mental or manual powers of women : Women can do many things which they are prevented from doing by the fashion of the times. Old women, and young women too, have su- perintended the natural function of child-bearing, from the beginning of the world, and will do so to the end, with per- fect safety to both mother and child, in ninety-nine cases of a hundred. Yet the most eminent physicians do not con- ceive themselves degraded by doing, every hour of the day, what they know many old women could do as well as they —for this simple and satisfactory reason—that, if not accustomed to ordinary, they would prove but poor helps in extraordinary, cases. In the fifth place. My practice is decried and obstructed by my antagonists, because it does not succeed in their hands. It would be a miracle if it did: They know nothing