AN OXYGEN GENERATOR AND INHALER: ITS USE IN MOUNTAIN SICKNESS
Authors: L. Hill
Journal: BMJ (1909)

ERDIGAL JOURNAL I?Tf Empiric glued to his particular, and the Methodist blown into his universal, dispensed with the need of inquiry into causes, or, indeed, into processes.While for the Methodist the specific fact was as soon as possible to be sublimed into one of the three universals, for the Empiric it was an ultimats; the one refused to see it, the other refused to pursue.it.This was a sad falling off from Erasistratus, who made some necropsies; he observed, for example, that in ascites the liver might be of stony hardness.But the Methodists soon discovered-or it was discovered for them-that to reduce medicine to two, or even to three, abstract categories was, because of its very facility, to reduce it to a vapid and fruitless pretence; they formulated, therefore, other universals subordinate to the chief triad.Yet even then, for the explanation of poisoning, of the invasion of foreign bodies, of tumours, and of surgery in general, the idea was unworkable, and, at any rate in its emptiness of content, futile.The parallel categories to which their therapeutics were necessarily reduced were of contraria contrariis; if, as in the first stage of fever, there was constriction, then re- laxants were to be used; if, as in the second stage, there was solution, then astringents.So, again, in presumptive local leaks or stoppages astringent or solvent remedies respectively were to be directed to the affected area.It is easy to see how such rules-of-thumb must lead, as in fact they did, to the vainest and most senseless routine, and how destructive they were of the method of Hippocrates, which, as Celsus wrote, was mederi oportere et communia et propria intuentem.Still, as in all such revolts, the leaders, as we have glimpses of them down the centuries in Oribasius, Aetius, Alexander of Tralles, were better than their followers.But I must permit myself aain to commend the excellent and permanently influential side of their therapeutics, derived, from their forefathers, Asclepiades and Erasistratus, that which con- gruently with their physical views led to the correspondent extension and development of the physical means of cure f passive movements, graduated exercises, special baths, diet, regimen, and so forth.These were the methods which in the hands of Asclepiades supplemented the barbarous practices of Archagathus.A proverbial rule of the Methodists, which we trace back to Asclepiades and Erasistratus, was the well-known three days' abstinence with which they commenced the treatment in acute disease.It was in the later stages that wine and good feeding was recommended.In obstetrics the Methodists attained distinction, especially in the person of Soranus, whose fame, and the fragments and titles of whose works, testify to remarkable abilities, not in obstetrics only, but over the whole sphere of medicine.The man is reflected in his terse, lucid, shrewd, and practical style.Soranus was, as it were, reconstructed from these relics by Reinhold Dietz of Konigsberg, another learned physician carried off prematurely by death.The development of obstetrics probably arose out of the Alexandrian anatomy; we know that Herophilus wrote upon the subject.Thessalus of Tralles, on the contrary, in the reign of Nero, reveals himself to us as an arrogant boaster, and not only as