An Exerpt From One of Thomas Jefferson's Letters....

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It appears, from this letter, that Jefferson might well have been in

favor of holistic/alternative medicine were he alive today:

 

" ...the disorders of the animal body, & the symptoms indicating them,

are as various as the elements of which the body is composed. The

combinations, too, of these symptoms are so infinitely diversified,

that many associations of them appear too rarely to establish a

definite disease; and to an unknown disease, there cannot be a known

remedy. Here then, the judicious, the moral, the humane physician

should stop. Having been so often a witness to the salutary efforts

which nature makes to re-establish the disordered functions, he

should rather trust to their action, than hazard the interruption of

that, and a greater derangement of the system, by conjectural

experiments on a machine so complicated & so unknown as the human

body, & a subject so sacred as human life. Or, ifthe appearance of

doing something be necessary to keep alive the hope & spirits of the

patient, it should be of the most innocent character. One of the most

successful physicians I have ever known, has assured me, that he used

more bread pills, drops of colored water, & powders of hickory ashes,

than of all other medicines put together. It was certainly a pious

fraud. But the adventurous physician goes on, & substitutes

presumption for knolege. From the scanty field of what is known, he

launches into the boundless region of what is unknown. He establishes

for his guide some fanciful theory of corpuscular attraction, of

chemical agency, of mechanical powers, of stimuli, of irritability

accumulated or exhausted, of depletion by the lancet & repletion by

mercury, or some other ingenious dream, which lets him into all

nature's secrets at short hand. On the principle which he thus

assumes, he forms his table of nosology, arrays his diseases into

families, and extends his curative treatment, by analogy, to all the

cases he has thus arbitrarily marshalled together. I have lived

myself to see the disciples of Hoffman, Boerhaave, Stalh, Cullen,

Brown, succeed one another like the shifting figures of a magic

lantern, & their fancies, like the dresses of the annual doll-babies

from Paris, becoming, from their novelty, the vogue of the day, and

yielding to the next novelty their ephemeral favor. The patient,

treated on the fashionable theory, sometimes gets well in spite of

the medicine. The medicine therefore restored him, & the young doctor

receives new courage to proceed in his bold experiments on the lives

of his fellow creatures. I believe we may safely affirm, that the

inexperienced & presumptuous band of medical tyros let loose upon the

world, destroys more of human life in one year, than all the

Robinhoods, Cartouches, & Macheaths do in a century. It is in this

part of medicine that I wish to see a reform, an abandonment of

hypothesis for sober facts, the first degree of value set on clinical

observation, and the lowest on visionary theories. I would wish the

young practitioner, especially, to have deeply impressed on his mind,

the real limits of his art, & that when the state of his patient gets

beyond these, his office is to be a watchful, but quiet spectator of

the operations of nature, giving them fair play by a well-regulated

regimen, & by all the aid they can derive from the excitement of good

spirits & hope in the patient. I have no doubt, that some diseases

not yet understood may in time be transferred to the table of those

known. But, were I a physician, I would rather leave the transfer to

the slow hand of accident, than hasten it by guilty experiments on

those who put their lives into my hands. The only sure foundations of

medicine are, an intimate knolege of the human body, and observation

on the effects of medicinal substances on that. The anatomical &

clinical schools, therefore, are those in which the young physician

should be formed. If he enters with innocence that of the theory of

medicine, it is scarcely possible he should come out untainted with

error. His mind must be strong indeed, if, rising above juvenile

credulity, it can maintain a wise infidelity against the authority of

his instructors, & the bewitching delusions of their theories... "

 

Elliot