Vis Medicatrix Naturæ

نویسنده

  • G. Munro Smith
چکیده

T have chosen for my theme "the healing powers of Nature," the vis medicatrix naturce. This phrase was first used, as far as I can discover, by Cullen, who thought that some secret force, which was antagonistic to disease, resided in the animal body. He looked upon most of the symptoms of an illness as the result of a reaction against the causes of disease. Fever, for example, he considered a reparative process, and gout, according to him, was an atony of the digestive organs, against which a reparative effort in the form of a joint inflammation was periodically set up.1 This theory of Cullen's, in spite of its obvious errors, has an element of truth in it curiously in accord with some of the explanations of modern physiology and pathology. In a brilliant and suggestive address given before the British Medical Association at Cambridge, in August, 1880,2 Sir James Paget ujfged the importance of a catholic spirit in the study of pathology, and especially laid stress on the lessons to be learnt from the diseases of plants, and Nature's attempts to heal them. He mentioned the fact, for instance (which we have most of us

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عنوان ژورنال:

دوره 27  شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2016