to his patient and may be known from the observations of his own or of others, and who afterward compareth all these with one another, and puts them in an opposite view to such things as happen in an healthy state; and lastly, from all this, with the nicest and severest bridle upon his reasoning faculty, riseth to the knowledge of the very first cause of the disease, and of the remedies fit to remove them; he, and only he, deserveth the name of a true physician.
Then Boerhaave proceeds to make a classification of
diseases, and among the very first groups which one finds
in this classified list are the following: "Distempers of
a lax and weak fibre"; "Distempers of the stiff and elastic
fibre"; "Distempers of the less and larger vessels";
"Distempers of weak and lax entrails"; "Distempers of
the too strong and stiff entrails"; etc.—from which it is
apparent that the old doctrine of the strictum and the
laxum, which was taught by the Methodists in the early
centuries of our era, has here been adopted by Boerhaave
in all its essential characters; and also that the treatment
which he recommends for some of these classes of maladies
does not materially differ from that advocated by this
ancient school of medicine. The following extracts, I
believe, will suffice to give the reader a fairly clear understanding
of what Boerhaave means by the expressions
"distempers of the solid simple fibre," "distempers of a
lax and weak fibre," and "distempers of the stiff and elastic
fibre," and will at the same time show what methods he
employed for overcoming these distempers. At the time
when Boerhaave made use of the term "fibre" (fibra) in
the very uncertain sense in which he here employs it,
Leeuwenhoek and Malpighi were demonstrating, by aid of
the newly perfected microscope, that the so-called simple
tissues were in reality quite complex structures; and one's
first impulse, therefore, is to express surprise that a physician
of such high standing as our author should have used
the term. But we moderns must not forget that, in those
early days, it took decades for knowledge of this nature to
spread even a very short distance, as from Delft to Leyden,
and then to exert its legitimate influence upon medical
