[836] De Febribus &c., Lond. 1657: cap. ix. “De Variolis et Morbillis,” p. 141.
[837] “First of all,” he says, “let the patient be kept with all care and diligence from cold air, especially in winter, so that the pores of the skin may be opened and the pocks assisted to come out. Therefore let him be kept in a room well closed, into which cold air is in no manner to enter, and let him be sedulously covered up in bed.... I desire the more to admonish my friends in this matter, for that Robert Cage, esquire, my dear sister’s husband,” etc.
[838] Besides cases to show the ill effects of blooding, vomits, purges and cooling medicines such as spirit of vitriol, he gives examples as if to refute Sydenham’s favourite notion that salivation, diarrhoea and menstrual haemorrhage were relieving or salutary. Morton’s chief object was to bring out the eruption, and to get it to maturate kindly; an eruption which languished, or did not rise and fill, was for him the most untoward of events. Sydenham, on the other hand, argued that the danger was in proportion to the number of pustules and to the total quantity of matter contained in them; and he sought, accordingly, to restrain cases which threatened to be confluent by an evacuant treatment or repressive regimen.
[839] Walter Lynn, M.B., A more easy and safe Method of Cure in the Smallpox founded upon Experiments, and a Review of Dr Sydenham’s Works, Lond. 1714; Some Reflections upon the Modern Practice of Physic in Relation to the Smallpox, Lond. 1715. F. Bellinger, A Treatise concerning the Smallpox, Lond. 1721.
[840] Letter from Woodward to the Weekly Journal, 20 June, 1719, in Nichols, Lit. Anecd. VI. 641.
[841] Rev. Dr Mangey to Dr Waller, 4 March, 1720, London. Nichols’ Lit. Anecd. I. 135.
[842] Huxham, Phil. Trans. XXXII. (1725), 379.
[843] Gent. Magaz., Sept. 1752.
[844] John Barker, M.D., Agreement betwixt Ancient and Modern Physicians, Lond. 1747. Also two French editions. It is on Van Helmont that Barker pours his scorn for “breaking down the two pillars of ancient medicine—bleeding and purging in acute diseases.” That upsetting person forbore to bleed even in pleurisy; the only thing that he took from the ancient medicine was a thin diet in fevers; “and yet this scheme, as wild and absurd as it seems, had its admirers for a time.”
[845] Lynn (u. s. 1714-15) agrees as to the matter of fact, namely, that the mortality from smallpox was greater among the richer classes, who were too much pampered and heated in their cure, than among the poorer, who had not the means to fee physicians and pay apothecaries’ bills.