Tapeworms, Human Entozoa, Their Sources, Nature, and Treatment Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: TREATMENT. Almo8t every fresh case of tapeworm offers some new fact, or some novel phase of previously ascertained facts that have a practical bearing on the right management of the affection. The conceptions of professional duty, however, as ordinarily expressed and maintained in this connection are of a kind that tend to reduce the physician's functions to the vulgar level of the ancient 'worm-doctor.' To be sure, it needs some moral courage on the part of any medical man who desires by his conduct to rescue this department of practice from the baneful influences of prejudice and quackery. Conscious of the high order of scientific work necessary for the advancement of practical helmin- thology, I have been not a little amused at the positive terror displayed by one or two of my medical friends lest by the publication of their experiences about tapeworms and threadworms they should come to be dishonoured with the title of (worm-doctor.' For my part, it appears that the study of any cause?let it be a worm or an infectious poison of the vilest character?operatingto produce serious mischief in the human frame ought not to be considered as beneath the dignity of those whose express function it is to 'heal all manner of disease.' The childish fanaticism to which I have alluded will not be overcome just yet; but it will eventually be stamped out. In the pages of the 'Lancet' for 1874 (vol i. p. 793) I gave an analysis of the experiences gathered from eighty consecutive and unselected cases of tapeworm occurring in my private practice. That communication, whilst it formed a small contribution towards our knowledge of the statistics of tapeworm, was intended more particularly to show the need there is of greater care and precision in the diagnosis and management of this common d...Read More