Daily National Intelligencer

ON HYDROPHOBIAN SPECIFICS.

To the Editors of the National Intelligencer.

Whenever men of liberal education and long experience have presented their medical remarks to the public, they have justly obtained the praise of ingenuity and benevolence. Fame increased their practice, and practice rewarded them with well-earned opulence. Who can deserve it better than he, of whom it can justly be said that he is opifer per orbem in his practice, and per orbem in his communications to the public? As respects the remedy of Professor Brugnatelli for Hydrophobia, it is no doubt the wish of every person that experience may sanction its general use in such a formidable disease. But, however sanguine the learned Professor may have been in communicating it to his medical brethren for further investigation and trial, we are doubtful whether it was his intention to proclaim it to the public as a specific. The author of the piece signed Wistar, I hope, is not a dealer in specifics--I mean those nostrums which have long pervaded our continent with their direful influence, and hurled many a credulous mortal into eternity. If not, I wish him to reflect how the Nitric Acid and the Oxymuriate of Gold were once estimated in Syphilis, and our doubts respecting them at the present period. Indeed, the analogy is a proper one, for there is a specific virus in both cases. He says that the practice does not at all interfere with the use of Caustic in the treatment. I ask what is the Oxymuriatic Acid but a Caustic, and what good effect can it have internally over other cauterizing applications, or externally by its super-oxygenation over oxygen, applied in any other way? The neutralization of the acid by the alkali, I suppose likewise prevents its specific action, and the pure acid is to take the round of circulation, without change, destroying all the absorbed virus in its way, until the healthy excitement of the arterial system is restored. Whoever takes a retrospective view of medicines, which a few years ago were highly extolled and generally used, will find many of them at present in total disrepute. Yet, if you will believe the writings which recommended them on their first appearance, their beneficial efficacy was indubitably confirmed by innumerable cases. If they were efficacious once, they are probably still efficacious; for, it is not to be believed that, by any causes whatever, the human body can have undergone a total change since their introduction. But they are now perhaps pronounced by the best judges utterly inefficacious or pernicious, and there is reason, therefore, to conclude that they were always so, and owed their popularity and success to novelty or to the activity, address, and recommendation of some artful professor of medicine. The spirit of research and adventure is, indeed, laudable; but when a powerful medicine is hastily recommended to the public, many fall victims to it before the full discovery of its ill effects. Indeed, they will act humanely as well as prudently, who add a chapter of cautions in the use of whatever they recommend, or express themselves with doubt and diffidence on the certainty of their discoveries and the infallibilities of their remedies. H