Materia Medica

Abstract

Physicians had always sought to see beneath the skin. What was it that constituted health and disease and what were the physiological processes that explained, perhaps constituted, life and death? (Rosenberg, 1987, p. 154) A young candlestick maker enters a Philadelphia hospital in 1826 fussing about nausea, a head-ache, chills, and frail joints. Before seeing a physician, he is given the following treatments: Was bled till symptoms of fainting came on. Took an emetic, which operated well. For several days after, kept his bowels moved with Sulph. Soda, Senna tea, etc. He then employed a physician who prescribed another Emetic, which operated violently and whose action was kept up by drinking bitter tea (Case of George Devert, November 15, 1826, Hospital Casebook, 1824–27, PCA (Philadelphia City Archives) in Rosenberg, 1987, pp. 76–77).