It has sometimes been claimed by metropolitan physicians that the rural
brethren are slow to avail themselves of the various discoveries in
medicine and surgery, and that they go on very much as their grand
mothers did. Here as elsewhere in the universe there are compensations.
Your country doctor can now look back a little, and with regard to many
of the startling advances of these latter years he can see that the
“advance” has been backward; and he is not quite sorry that his bucolic
inertia has kept him from doing urban oöphorectomy upon all his
hysterical female acquaintances.
On other occasions he accepts the dicta of the medical centers with
alacrity, and refuses to be called off when the fashion changes. This
was seen in the case of coal tar. No sooner had the chemists, private
docents, assistant physicians, and royal and imperial professors of
Germany and Austria, announced the mighty powers of antipyrine, than he
began to employ it, and a little later its congeners, to drive fever and
pain out of the world.
In many a remote country village this policy is still followed so
vigorously that fever patients are kept blue and sometimes black by
frequent and heroic doses of coal tar; and yet the great majority
survive in spite of the disease and the antipyretic.
Very lately a rampant enemy of coal tar wrote: “While in the medical
centers the coal tar antipyretics are being reluctantly abandoned, it
will be long ere less enlightened rural practitioner will let this
comforting drug slip from his fond grasp.”
Here then we have the two extremes; and here again sound practice lies
about midway between them.
These antipyretics when used with skill and caution can be made, in many
cases, to replace with advantage, morphine on the one hand, and cold
baths on the other. Surely, medicines capable of playing such a part in
therapeutics, deserve careful consideration.