Definition. Mechanical and Medicinal Therapeutics. Adaptation to each
case of disease.
The ultimate object of all medicine is to prevent disease or when it
cannot be prevented, to cure. The term therapeutics covers all measures
applied with curative object. Therapeutics are naturally divided into
=Mechanical= and =Medicinal=. To mechanical therapeutics pertains the
whole domain of surgery. Medicinal therapeutics has to do especially
with internal medicine. Each of them, however, encroaches more or less
on the other. Modern surgery is essentially aseptic or antiseptic, and
antisepsis is secured by medicinal agents. In medicine when cups are
applied we adopt an essentially mechanical treatment. Both methods then
must remain open to physician and surgeon. Another and no less important
branch of treatment which is open to physician and surgeon alike is diet
and general hygiene. The same care must be given to the use of these in
the treatment of disease as in its prevention, and in many cases a
judicious use of these may almost entirely obviate the necessity for
medicine.
It would be useless to enter here into the subject of therapeutics.
Suffice it to say that the choice of a system and of individual agents
must be determined by the particular conditions of the case, its cause,
and nature, the strength, vigor, and genus of the patient, the organ
involved, the extent and stage of the disease, the existence of a
relapse, or complication, and all other circumstances that would affect
the action of the remedy. Specific statements must be made with the
several diseases.