Medical Practice

“Bleeding still lingered, however, though increasingly in the practice of older men and in less cosmopolitan areas. Mercury . . . still figured omnipresently in the practice of most physicians; even infants and small children endured the symptoms of mercury poisoning until well after the Civil War. Purges were still routinely administered in spring and fall to facilitate physiological adjustment to the changing seasons. The purposely induced blisters and excoriated running sores so familiar to physicians and patients at the beginning of the century were gradually replaced by mustard plasters or turpentine applications, but the ancient concept of counter-irritation still rationalized their use. . . . To most physicians at mid-century, one disease could still shade into another; illness was still in many ways a place along a spectrum of physiological possibilities – not some category entity capable of afflicting almost anyone with the same patterned symptoms as the more devoted advocates of French medicine contended. Holistic definitions of sickness as a general state of the organism were consistent with social attitudes toward need and dependence, in that both included moral as well as material elements. In both, the interplay of individual and environment could bring about health or disease, prosperity or poverty (Rosenberg II, 92-93).