Thomas Beddoes to Nathaniel Hulme[?], 30 July 1792
TO THE DISCOVERER OF THE VIRTUES OF VEGETABLE ALKALI, SUPERSATURATED WITH CARBONIC ACID.
SIR,
It has been frequently with great confidence affirmed, that our acute pains are of short duration. A very slight acquaintance, however, with the tremendous catalogue of human maladies, will satisfy us that this is the vain aphorism of a sophist, more anxious to place words in opposition, than to observe the course of nature. Our excruciating diseases are, if I do not compute very much amiss, remarkable for length of paroxysms, and for frequency of recurrence; while in those of a different character, languor and depression are scarce less intolerable than the most intense pain.
I hope, and I believe, that this mighty mass of evil will be gradually diminished, and finally disappear from the face of the earth. We are just beginning to catch a glimpse of the laws of animal nature; and now, when the human mind seems, in so many countries, about to be roused from that torpor, by which it has been so long benumbed, we may reasonably indulge the expectation of a rapid progress in this, the most beneficial of all the sciences. An infinitely small portion of genius has hitherto been exerted in attempts to diminish the sum of our painful sensations; and the force of society has been exclusively at the disposal of Despots and Juntos, the great artificers of human evil. Should an entire change in these two respects, any where take place, every member of society might soon expect to experience, in his own person, the consequence of so happy an innovation; and should the example be generally followed, there is no improvement in the condition of the World, for which we might not hope from the bloodless rivalship of nations.
From Chemistry, which is daily unfolding the profoundest secrets of nature, and, among the rest, the delicate play of living machinery, your example alone would justify us in entertaining the most sanguine expectations: since the earliest discoveries in that department of chemistry, which has been so successfully cultivated by BLACK, CAVENDISH, PRIESTLY, SCHEELE, and LAVOISIER, suggested to you a safe and efficacious remedy for one of the most frequent, painful, and hopeless of diseases.
Much as you have contributed, by the frank and disinterested communication of your discovery, to obliterate one of the darkest shades from the prospect of life, your name is, I suspect, scarce known beyond the narrow circle of the practitioners of medicine, except, perhaps, to a few among those who are indebted to you for ease and health. Such is the inattention of mankind to their best benefactors! and so entirely have fatal illusions perverted our moral sentiments! I cannot hope to add much to your reputation; but by attempting to diffuse more widely the benefit for which mankind are originally indebted to you, I may perhaps afford you gratification.
That the former part of the following pamphlet will do some good, I am confident; though I do not believe that alkaline medicines will relieve calculous disorders under every form. Those disorders, beside the different seats they occupy in different persons, appear also, from the analyses of various calculi, to be liable to considerable variation in their nature.
The speculations that follow, will, perhaps, appear to you too remote from application, and my hopes of the future improvement of medicine too high-flying.
It is, I am sensible, but a poor expedient, to lay one's self out for the praise of ingenuity by proposing projects which are in no danger of being disgraced by trial ; nor have I ever much regarded medical observations, that are of no other use than to be read. But this, I can assure you, shall not be the case here; and the more I reflect, the more confident I become, that an easy and convenient method of offering phthisical patients a chance of recovery, which has never yet, upon any probable grounds, been offered them, will shortly be contrived. For typhus, if the light that is now dawning upon physiology and pathology does not present objects to me under very illusive forms, we shall not fail to strike out an almost infallible method of cure; and this method, I think it probable, will extend to the scarlet fever also; which is perhaps the most formidable among the acute diseases of this climate. In the treatment of fevers we have, it is true, learned to avoid some fatal mistakes of our ancestors; but we can boast of little else. In those cases in which alone there is, perhaps, occasion for the interference of art, art seems almost impotent: from attention to the single circumstance of debility, I imagine, that patients are often drenched with wine and opiates, till they are stimulated to death. If I have imputed the debility to its real cause, our chief aim should be to restore the principle of excitability; and stimulants should in the mean time be administered with a more sparing hand. Perhaps, when the proper method of restoring this principle shall have been devised, extraordinary stimulants will become unnecessary. The Materia Medica was once supposed to contain distinct specifics for the diseases of each separate organ; it is now regarded as little else than a collection of stimuli; so that medicine is become the art of administering drams. Hence it can often only amuse or palliate, and must sometimes injure, by forcing into motion, constitutions already too much worn. How would our resources be multiplied, if we could give excitability or life, as well as stimulants! ‘But is so salutary a revolution in medicine possible?’ I do not know; but is it not worth while to enquire?
I am, Sir
Respectfully your’s,
Oxford,
30th July 1792.
Thomas Beddoes
Published: Thomas Beddoes, Observations on the Nature and Cure of Calculus, Sea Scurvy, Consumption, Catarrh and Fever (London: printed for J. Murray, 1793), pp. iii–viii.