On the Principles of Sthetic Medicine, Or, the Natural Use of Sensation and Desire in the Maintenance of Health and the Treatment of Disease

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1867. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... our artistic proposition is available equally in the conditions of health and disease. Section 13.--On direct attention to tlie organs and functions, and to the influence of vital agents upon tliem, considered irrespectively of immediately sensible congeniality. We have, hitherto, more especially directed our attention to the susceptibility of the external senses to congenial impressions, as the leading clue to the orderly voluntary developetnent of life, with all its other susceptibilities and functions. We have, however, observed that the external senses are so mutually related, that they exercise, so to speak, on each other, at once an exciting and a restraining influence, which tends to apportion to each sense its due share in vital suggestion and developement. We have, moreover, found that the mental faculties and affections, as they are gradually developed, exercise, not only a similar mutual influence on each other, but also a reflex influence of a similar character- on the external senses themselves, in both cases, at once exciting and restraining. We have also adverted to a similar mutual relation of the more directly social susceptibilities to each other, and a similar reflex and reciprocal relation of these to all the susceptibilities, which may be conveniently considered as more directly pertaining to the individual. And it may be here observed that no form of vital susceptibility whatever, is beyond the influence of this general law of vital reciprocity. The very first or primordial germ of organic sensibility is essentially and formally dependant, for its developement, on the highest susceptibilities of organized and social life; which, in their turn, are developed and sustained by this germ; the phenomena of organized life being, thr...