Therapeutics

“The body could be seen that is – as in some ways it had been since classical antiquity – as a kind of stewpot, or chemico-vital reaction, proceeding calmly only if all its elements remained appropriately balanced. . . . Drugs had to be seen as adjusting the body’s internal equilibrium; in addition, the drug’s action had, if possible to alter these visible products of the body’s otherwise inscrutable internal state. . . . The effectiveness of the system hinged to a significant extent on the fact that all the weapons in the physician’s normal armamentarium worked: ‘worked,’ that is, by providing visible and predictable physiological effects; purges purged; emetics vomited, opium soothed pain and moderated diarrhea. Bleeding, too seemed obviously to alter the body’s internal balance. . . . This same explanatory framework illuminates as well the extraordinary vogue of mercury in early nineteenth-century therapeutics. If employed for a sufficient length of time and in sufficient quantity, mercury induced a series of progressively severe and cumulative physiological effects: first, diarrhea, and ultimately, full-blown symptoms of mercury poisoning. . . . Recovery must, of course, often have coincided with the administration of a particular drug and thus provided an inevitable post hoc endorsement of its effective. A physician could typically describe a case of pleurisy as having been ‘suddenly relieved by profuse perspiration’ elicited by the camphor he had prescribed. Fevers seemed, in fact, often to be healed by the purging effects of mercury or antimony” (Rosenberg, 6-9).