Quacks and Grafters

By EX-OSTEOPATH
BEING AN EXPOSÉ OF THE STATE OF THERAPEUTICS AT THE PRESENT TIME, WITH SOME REASONS WHY SUCH GRAFTERS FLOURISH, AND SUG- GESTIONS TO REMEDY THE DEPLORABLE MUDDLE
Published in the Year 1908 by The Cincinnati Medical Book Company Cincinnati Ohio
Copyrighted, 1908, By The Cincinnati Medical Book Co.
The Lancet-Clinic Press, Cincinnati, Ohio.
To the GREAT AMERICAN PUBLIC is Dedicated This Book, With Every Confidence in its Proverbial Common Sense and Discrimination, and With the Hope of Having Added a Mite Toward Greater and Better Things in the Art of Aesculapius.

There has been but one other period in the history of medicine when so many systems of the healing art were in vogue. In the seventeenth century, during the Reform Period, following the many epoch-making discoveries, as the blood and lymph circulation; when alchemy was abandoned and chemistry became a science; when Galileo regenerated physics, and zoology and botany were largely extended; when Newton enunciated the laws of gravitation; when cinchona bark, the great febrifuge, was introduced into Europe, and the cell doctrine was founded by Hooke, Malpighi and Grew, the old Hippocratic, Galenic and Arabic systems of medicine were undermined. In that transition period, when the medical profession was trying to adjust its practice with the many new theories, its authoritative voice was lost, and in the struggle for something tangible, innumerable new systems sprang up.
Four systems stood out most prominently—the pietistically colored Paracelsism of Von Helmont, with its sal, sulphur and mercury; the chemical system of Sylvius and Willis, with its acid and alkali theory of cause and cure of disease; the iatro-chemical system, with its fermentation theory; and the iatro-physical system, which contended that health was dependent upon proper adjustment of physical and mechanical arrangements of the body. The old humoral theory of Galen had its adherents, influencing all of the newer systems. And suggestive therapeutics was rampant in most grotesque and fanciful forms. Witchcraft, superstition and cabalism were fostered even at the various European courts. As Roswell Park says in his History of Medicine: “With delightful satire Harvey divided the physicians of the day into six classes—the Ferrea, Asinaria, Jesuitica, Aquaria, Laniaria and Stercoraria—according as their favorite systems of treatment were the administration of iron, asses’ milk, cinchona, mineral water, venesection or purgatives.”