The number of treatises which Boerhaave published is quite large, the most important among them being the following: "Oratio de commendando studio Hippocratico," 1701; "Institutiones medicae in usus annuae exercitationis domesticos," 1708; "Aphorismi de cognoscendis et curandis morbis in usum doctrinae medicae," 1709 (English version printed in London in 1742); and "Elementa chemiae," 1732 (English translation by Peter Shaw, London, 1741).
Of the "Aphorisms," one of the most widely known of Boerhaave's published treatises, I shall take the liberty of saying a few words. This work is in reality a very concise statement of the author's views regarding pathology, pathological anatomy and therapeutics, and I believe that the following paragraphs, although few in number, will suffice to give our readers a fair idea of the general character of the book. At the same time I must confess that I have not found it an easy matter to understand and satisfactorily digest many of the individual aphorisms, the text of which has been compressed into such a small space. It therefore does seem surprising to learn from one critic that, if one wishes to ascertain what Boerhaave's views are with regard to the science of medicine, one should read by preference the Commentaries of Van Swieten, who was Boerhaave's favorite pupil and assistant.
The following four or five aphorisms are typical specimens belonging to the earlier sections of the book:—[1]
(7.) A disease when present in a body, must needs be the bodily
effect of a particular cause directed to that body.
(8.) Which effect being entirely removed, health is recovered.
(9.) It may be removed by correcting the illness itself in particular, viz., by the applications of medicines to the particular diseased part, or by some remedies which operate equally upon the whole: the first we'll call a particular, the latter a general cure.
(10.) The way to both is discovered either by observation, or by comparing one case with another, or by a true reasoning from them both.
(13.) He who doth, with the greatest exactness imaginable, weigh every individual thing that shall happen or hath happened
- ↑ Quoted from the English translation mentioned above.
