APPENDIX:
CONTAINING
A List of Simples and of such Medicinal Preparations as ought to be kept in Readiness for private Practice:
The Method of preparing and compounding such Medicines as are recommended in the former Part of the Book, with the Addition of several others of a similar Nature:
Remarks on the Doses, Uses, and Manner of applying the different Preparations.
Medicamentorum varietas ignorantiæ filia est. Bacon.
INTRODUCTION.
Ignorance and superstition have attributed extraordinary medical virtues to almost every production of nature. That such virtues were often imaginary, time and experience have sufficiently shewn. Physicians, however, from a veneration for antiquity, still retain in their lists of medicine many things which owe their reputation entirely to the superstition and credulity of our ancestors.
The instruments of medicine will always be multiplied, in proportion to men’s ignorance of the nature and cause of diseases: when these are sufficiently understood, the method of cure will be simple and obvious.
Ignorance of the real nature and permanent properties of those substances employed in the cure of diseases, is another reason why they have been so greatly multiplied. Physicians thought they could effect by a number of ingredients, what could not be done by any one of them. Hence arose those amazing farragos which have so long disgraced the medical art, and which were esteemed powerful in proportion to the number of simples that entered their composition.