The Lettres a un medecin de province, in a style of lively criticism, labour to show a great variety of inconsistencies in this immoveable doctrine. The review of this publication in the Revue Medicale, including copious extracts, coincides with, and evidently wishes to aid, the author's satire. In the same journal are a series of criticisms on some of the elementary propositions of Dr. Broussais, published in a late edition of his Examen; (nearly the same which were published here, some time since, in the American Medical Recorder, having been translated by Dr. Atkins.) In these critiques, great severity is shown, in dealing with the new dogmas, and the doctrine is treated as one of dangerous tendency; while, at the same time, high praise is awarded to their author, for his discoveries in the diseases of the alimentary mucous membranes.
In the other journals, there is a division; some favouring the new opinions, while others oppose them with more or less of vehemence.
That the doctrine of gastritis has made a great impression at Paris, that almost every one believes in it, to a greater or less extent, appears undeniable; but there, as well as here, most of the more rational, and moderate minded men are evidently of the only school a physician ought to belong to, the eclectic. Borrowing largely from Broussais, and having had their minds powerfully stimulated by the succession of striking and novel ideas which he has introduced, they think it unmanly to "bind themselves to his chariot-wheel," but form conclusions for themselves from every resource within their power. If the great French reformer really wishes to establish as absolute a power over the minds of his followers, as Mahomet or Pythagoras did, and as the above-quoted extract seems pretty fairly to indicate, he must certainly undergo many mortifications. Notwithstanding the "inebranlable" nature of his dogmas, M. Miquel has furnished us with several variations from them, in the writings of Messrs. Boisseau, Roche, Sanson, Remusat, Richond, and Begin; and the last-named individual has had a public dispute with his preceptor.
M. Begin has produced his promised work on surgery, according to the principles of the new school. We have not seen the volume, but have read a review of it in the Revue Medicale, by M. Bellanger. The latter describes it as a cursory work, having for its object the adaptation of surgery to a set of general principles, rather than a detailed system of instructions how to proceed in each individual case. It contains only what is easy to be remembered, and omits those matters for which it is usual to refer to books. Thus two pages only are appropriated to fractures of the body and neck of the femur! and twenty-six for the whole subject of fractures, wounds, and six or eight of the most important diseases, of bones! Yet all this criticism is not without a compliment, well-merited at least by the former productions of the same author, to his talents and ingenuity.
19. Whooping-cough.—"There is no disease of children, in which the resources of medicine are more manifestly serviceable than in an obstinate whooping-cough." Such, in amount, was the opinion of Dr. Underwood, and Dr. Watt uses language almost equally strong. Certainly, we are not at all times equally successful or equally sanguine in America.
Dr. A. Cavenne considers whooping-cough a true bronchitis, a pulmonary catarrh; accompanied with greatly heightened nervous symptoms, owing to the irritable period of life at which it occurs, and particularly to its frequent existence in nervous constitutions. Professor Tourtelle calls it a pneumo-gastric, pituitous catarrh; and certainly, the pupils of a modern school will find no difficulty in recognizing symptoms of gastritis in its severer forms. The further inferences drawn by Dr. Cavenne, are as follows:
1. That the whooping-cough, in an individual of a sanguine temperament, requires, in general, the use of bleeding, and a debilitating regimen.
2. That bleeding and a debilitating treatment are equally necessary, whatever be the temperament, in whooping-cough of the chronic form.
3. The antispasmodics are necessary in nervous constitutions.
4. That blood-letting and the debilitating treatment should be rejected, when the subject is endowed with a lymphatic temperament. This observation, says our author, is equally applicable to early infancy, in which lymph predominates over the red blood, and the fluids are more diluted.