CHAPTER VII
DR. GUENEAU DE MUSSY HAY FEVER AS URTICARIA AGAIN
In searching through the early literature of rosin-weed, as related in Chapter XIV I noted that the article in the Eclectic Medical Review recommending rosin-weed for asthma seemed to have been copied only in the southern and western medical journals. I was curious to know if the aristocratic medical editors of the east, the intimates of Bigelow and Holmes and Warren, had deigned to notice a drug of such lowly parentage, discovered by the Indians and indorsed by the medical heretics. I began with the stately row of bound volumes of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, running back to 1860, that repose on a dusty back shelf of the Library of the New York Academy of Medicine. Looking through the volumes around 1868, when the use of rosin-weed in asthma was being quoted in the south and west, I found many quaint notes and comments, but no mention of rosin-weed. To any physician who has a taste for the history of his art, I would recommend reading a journal of fifty years ago. So many things have been settled that those old physicians puzzled and fought over that it gives one the sense of amusement or lofty detachment of the gods, looking down on struggling, wriggling humanity, yet knowing all the time how it would come out.
In those old books I noticed abundant quips and sneers at homœopathy, now happily taboo in the more courteous journalism of to-day. Besides, they are not so funny now. The doctrine of like-cures-like and the small dose has achieved respectability. When armies all over the world are depending on a minute dose of typhoid poison to prevent and cure typhoid fever, when articles appear in the most respectable medical journals advocating doses of tuberculin so small that they have never been calculated and one-tenth grain doses of calomel instead of the twenty-grain doses of our grandfathers, most of the merry jests have lost their flavor to-day. Rather as I expected, in the Boston Journal, I found no notice of the eclectic rosin-weed, but I found something better, a clinical lecture on hay fever by a man after my own heart, who, away back in 1868, had recognized the urticarial nature of the lesion in hay fever. This was a Clinical Lecture on Spasmodic Coryza or Periodical Asthma, delivered at the Hôtel Dieu, by Professor Gueneau de Mussy, translated from the Gazette des Hôpitaux by W. F. Munroe, M.D. The lecture runs through several numbers of the Journal, beginning in March, 1869, page 125. It should be read by every rhinologist and by every physician who is treating hay fever.
When the chemist Woehler, one afternoon in 1828, tried to make up some ammonium cyanate by mixing ammonium sulphate and potassium sulphate and found that he had synthesized urea, one of his colleagues said that he was like Saul, who went out to find his father's asses and found a kingdom. I felt the same way; only, in my case, I went out among the asses and found a king.
When Solomon made his despondent remark that there was nothing new under the sun and that of the making of books there is no end, he must have been in his library sorting out his collection of old Assyrian bricks and found that his favorite thoughts had been said already and said better by some old Hittite scribe a thousand years before. So I, who had fondly thought myself the discoverer of the urticarial nature of hay fever because I had searched the books of the specialists and found nothing about it, was surprised to find my observation anticipated by the Frenchman.
Salut! Hail to you across the years, Gueneau de Mussy, kindred spirit. It is not recorded that the gray-headed Dean of a great university ever stood you on a platform and hurled Latin adjectives at you; but in 1868 you had the sharpest eyes and clearest mind of any of them, M.D.'s or LL.D.'s, though bespattered with all the letters of the alphabet.
Of all the foolish things that scientific men quarrel about, one of the most foolish is the question of priority of discovery. A scientist who will welcome the opinion of another scientist agreeing with him the day after he announces his discovery will fight like a cat against evidence that the same man agreed with him the day before. It seems to me that if another human being confirms your work, it does not make any difference whether he does it the century before or after your transient existence. In fact, you should be more pleased to have it "confirmed" the century before, because then you will have a chance to know about it.
Besides recognizing the urticarial nature of the lesion, de Mussy sought the underlying cause of hay fever and thought to find it in the gouty diathesis. He notes the occurrence of hay fever in gouty families, its periodicity, its association with urticaria, eczema, granular pharyngitis and asthma, all characteristics of gout or arthritism.