The profession is diligently cauterizing and poulticing the sores which now and then appear on the surface, but the internal chronic disease, of which these are merely the external signs, is too often overlooked or neglected.
Some years ago we devised and put into practical operation a method of
TREATING PATIENTS AT THEIR HOMES,
without requiring them to undergo personal examinations. We reasoned that the physician has abundant opportunity to accurately determine the nature of most chronic diseases without ever seeing the patient. In substantiating that proposition, we cited the perfect accuracy with which scientists are enabled to deduce the most minute particulars in their several departments, which appears almost miraculous, if we view the subject in the light of the early ages. Take, for example, the electro-magnetic telegraph, the greatest invention of the age. Is it not a marvelous degree of accuracy which enables an operator to exactly locate a fracture in a sub-marine cable nearly three thousand miles long? Our venerable "clerk of the weather" has become so thoroughly familiar with the most wayward elements of nature that he can accurately predict their movements. He can sit in Washington and foretell what the weather will be in Florida or New York, as well as if hundreds of miles did not intervene between him and the places named. And so in all departments of modern science, what is required is the knowledge of certain signs. From these, scientists deduce accurate conclusions regardless of distance. A few fossils sent to the expert geologist enables him to accurately determine the rock-formation from which they were taken. He can describe it to you as perfectly as if a cleft of it were lying on his table. So also the chemist can determine the constitution of the sun as accurately as if that luminary were not ninety-five million miles from his laboratory. The sun sends certain signs over the "infinitude of space," which the chemist classifies by passing them through the spectroscope. Only the presence of certain substances could produce these solar signs.
So, also, in medical science,
DISEASE HAS CERTAIN UNMISTAKABLE SIGNS,
or symptoms, and, by reason of this fact, we have been enabled to originate and perfect a system of determining with the greatest accuracy the nature of chronic diseases without seeing and personally examining our patients. In recognizing diseases without a personal examination of the patient, we claim to possess no miraculous powers. We obtain our knowledge of the patient's disease by the practical application of well-established principles of modern science to the practice of medicine. And it is to the accuracy with which this system has endowed us that we owe our almost world-wide reputation for the skillful treatment of all lingering, or chronic, affections. This system of practice, with the marvelous success which has been attained through it, demonstrates the fact that diseases display certain phenomena, which, being subjected to scientific analysis, furnish abundant and unmistakable data to guide the judgment of the skillful practitioner aright in determining the nature of diseased conditions.
So successful has been this method of treating patients at a distance that there is scarcely a city or a village in the United States that is not represented by one or more cases upon the "Records of Practice" at the Invalids' Hotel and Surgical Institute. In all chronic diseases that are curable by medical treatment, it is only in very rare cases that we cannot do as well for the patient while he or she remains at home, as if here in person to be examined. But we annually treat hundreds of cases requiring surgical operations and careful after-treatment, and in these cases our Invalids' Hotel, or home, is indispensable. Here the patient has the services not only of the most skillful surgeons, but also, what is quite as necessary in the after treatment, of thoroughly trained and skilled nurses.
What should be the essential characteristics of an Invalids' Home?