" By the way, we have often thought Buchan's book
like the Dead Sea: you cannot fall into the latter without some of its
water incrusting on you, and you cannot read Buchan without feeling an
ache. Its popularity is founded upon the hackneyed adage "the knowledge of
a disease is half its cure." People will pore over its sea of calamities
till they almost fall into the fire, or get scalded with the water from a
kettle, and then turn to the Index, Scalds, page 326: perhaps this is a
good plan to test the practical value of a book, as the surgeon scalded
two fingers and plunged one into turpentine and the other into spirits of
wine to test their respective services in case of a scald.
Here too we may notice a cheap _Companion to the Family Medicine Chest,_
with an alphabetical arrangement of Medicines, their properties, and plain
rules for taking them; with the Cholera, of course, as a rider, and
cautions respecting suspended animation and poisons. The little
shillingsworth is in its fifteenth edition, so that many thousand persons
must have taken many million doses by its prescription, and in some cases
become their own medicine chests, with this book as their companion.
Pages:
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62