United States or Palestine ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The syllabus that he read on the notice-board stunned him: lectures on anatomy, lectures on pathology, lectures on physiology, lectures on pharmacy, lectures on botany and clinical medicine, and therapeutics, without counting hygiene and materia medica all names of whose etymologies he was ignorant, and that were to him as so many doors to sanctuaries filled with magnificent darkness.
That miraculous balsam, which would make doctors and surgeons sing small today if they had not suppressed it from the materia medica. May be they can silence their consciences by the reflection that they suppressed it to enhance the value and necessity of their own personal services. But let them look at the death rate and shudder.
Wild medicinal plants, so important in the rustic materia medica of New England such as pennyroyal, for example are generally much less aromatic and powerful when cultivated in gardens than when self-sown on meagre soils. "The soil of the Hauran," he remarks, "produces, in its primitive condition, much wild rye, which is not known as a cultivated plant in Syria, and much wild barley and oats.
And for Incoherent Speech, it was amongst the Gentiles taken for one sort of Prophecy, because the Prophets of their Oracles, intoxicated with a spirit, or vapour from the cave of the Pythian Oracle at Delphi, were for the time really mad, and spake like mad-men; of whose loose words a sense might be made to fit any event, in such sort, as all bodies are said to be made of Materia prima.
It is just as easy to suppose that we could have had our magnetic telegraphs, and daguerreotypes, and our new Materia Medica, and all the new inventions of modern science for man's relief, if the terms which were simple terms in the vocabulary of Aristotle and Pliny, had never been tested with the edge of the New Machine, and divided with its divine fire, if they had not ceased to be in the schools at least elementary; it is just as easy to suppose this, as it is to suppose that the true and nobler ends of science can ever be attained, so long as the powers that are actual in our human life, which are still at large in all their blind instinctive demoniacal strength there, which still go abroad free-footed, unfettered of science there, while we chain the lightning, and send it on our errands, so long as these still slip through the ring of our airy 'words, still riot in the freedom of our large generalizations, our sublime abstractions, so long as a mere human word-ology is suffered to remain here, clogging all with its deadly impotence, keeping out the true generalizations with their grappling-hooks on the particulars, the creative word of art which man learns from the creating wisdom, the word to which rude nature bows anew, the word which is Power.
Their materia prima, or universal solvent, serves equally for the lead of Tupper or the brass of Swinburne. In a letter of Sir Kenelm Digby to J. Winthrop, Jr., we find some odd prescriptions. "For all sorts of agues, I have of late tried the following magnetical experiment with infallible success.
The readiness with which it can be obtained in the summer renders it a valuable adjunct, undoubtedly, to the materia medica of the country practitioner or housewife for stopping hemorrhages in simple wounds.
Browne informs us "that in Africa, no part of the Materia Medica is so much in requisition as those which stimulate to venereal pleasure. The Lacerta scincus in powder, and a thousand other articles of the same kind, are in continual demand."
Similarly the Law Building has undergone many transformations, while the old Chemistry Building, now used by the Departments of Physiology, Materia Medica, and Economics as make-shift quarters, has lost through successive additions almost all trace of that first little laboratory which exemplified the progressive spirit of the University in her early days.
But, as the best medicines may lose their virtue, by being ill applied; so is it with Verse, if a fit Subject be not chosen for it. Neither must the Argument alone, but the Characters and Persons be great and noble: otherwise, as SCALIGER says of CLAUDIAN, the Poet will be Ignobiliore materia depressus.
Word Of The Day