Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c16.32

c16.32

The Eastern practitioners, with great modesty, arraign the European practice of phlebotomy and cathartics in any stage of the disease, but more particularly when designed to prevent, or mitigate the second fever; alleging, that the *first* weakens the natural powers, and that the *latter* counteracts the regular course of *nature*, which in this disease invariably tends to throw out the offending cause *upon the skin*; that she often proves unequal to the entire expulsion of the enemy, in which case, her wise purposes are to be assisted by art, in that track, which she herself points out, and not by a diversion of the usual crisis into another channel; that this assistance can only be attempted with propriety, by emptying the pustules, as thereby fresh room is given in them for the reception of the circulating matter still remaining in the blood, and which could not be contained in the first eruption; by which means every end and purpose of averting, or subduing the *second fever* is obtained, with a moral certainty; whilst phlebotomy and cathartics, administered with this view, are both irrational and precarious; as being opposite to the constant operation of nature in her management of this dreadful disease.