An Inquiry Into the Propagation of Contagious Poisons, by the Atmosphere

General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1839 Original Publisher: Maclachlan, Stewart Subjects: Communicable diseases Public health Fiction / Classics Literary Collections / General Medical / Infectious Diseases Medical / Epidemiology Medical / Health Care Delivery Medical / Public Health Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II. MEDICINE RETARDED FORMS OF CONTAGION. The progress of medical science has been much impeded by the operation of the doctrine of atmospheric contagion. From the earliest periods the practitioners of medicine have been in the habit of attributing a very great proportion of the worst forms of disease to that agent; and the consequence has been that little attention has been paid to the investigation of the most difficult, and not the least important department, that of the efficient and ordinary causes of disease. It was almost a necessary consequence of the possession of such an instrument, ready on all occasions, to solve the problems offered by the occurrences of disease, that no inquiry would be made into those circumstances by which might be detected those influences that conduce to its production. There was ever at hand an agent whose existence all were alike ready to concede, which was amply sufficient to explain the origin and propagation of pestilence. That being the case, medical men had no inducement to make investigations, and from one generation to another they have gone on in the old way, attributing much to thatagency, and leaving unintmired into, with few exceptions, the actual springs of diseased action. Until very lately little was known of the relation between disease and such important matters as these, -- the state of the...