THERAPEUTICS. TREATMENT.
Definition. Mechanical and Medicinal Therapeutics. Adaptation to each case of disease.
The ultimate object of all medicine is to prevent disease or when it cannot be prevented, to cure. The term therapeutics covers all measures applied with curative object. Therapeutics are naturally divided into Mechanical and Medicinal. To mechanical therapeutics pertains the whole domain of surgery. Medicinal therapeutics has to do especially with internal medicine. Each of them, however, encroaches more or less on the other. Modern surgery is essentially aseptic or antiseptic, and antisepsis is secured by medicinal agents. In medicine when cups are applied we adopt an essentially mechanical treatment. Both methods then must remain open to physician and surgeon. Another and no less important branch of treatment which is open to physician and surgeon alike is diet and general hygiene. The same care must be given to the use of these in the treatment of disease as in its prevention, and in many cases a judicious use of these may almost entirely obviate the necessity for medicine.
It would be useless to enter here into the subject of therapeutics. Suffice it to say that the choice of a system and of individual agents must be determined by the particular conditions of the case, its cause, and nature, the strength, vigor, and genus of the patient, the organ involved, the extent and stage of the disease, the existence of a relapse, or complication, and all other circumstances that would affect the action of the remedy. Specific statements must be made with the several diseases.