and partly in the desire to see manifest and strong effects resulting from the action of medicines. Mercury, iodine, colchicum, antimony, also purgatives in general and blood-letting, are frightfully misused in this manner. To encourage the administration of simple, feeble, or altogether powerless, non-purturbing medicines, in all cases in which drugs are prescribed pro forma, for the satisfaction of the patient's mind, and not with the view of producing any direct remedial effect.

"To make every effort not merely to destroy the prevalent system of giving a vast quantity and variety of unnecessary and useless drugs, to say the least of them, but to encourage extreme simplicity in the prescription of medicines that seem to be requisite.

"Our system is here greatly and radically wrong. Our officinal formulæ are already most absurdly and mischievously complex, and our fashion is to double and redouble the existing complexities. Nothing has a greater tendency to dissociate practical medicine from science, and to stamp it as a trade, than this system of pharmaceutical artifice. It takes some years of a student's life to learn the very things which are to block up his path to future knowledge. A very elegant prescriber is seldom a good physician. And no wonder. Tailors, barbers, and dancing-masters, however learned they may be in the externals of gentility, are not expected to be fine gentlemen or men of fashion!

"To endeavour to break through the routine habit, universally prevalent, of prescribing certain determinate remedies for certain determinate diseases or symptoms of diseases, merely because the prescriber has been taught to do so, and on no better grounds than conventional tradition.

"Even when the medicines so prescribed are innocuous, the routine proceeding impedes real knowledge by satisfying the mind, and thus producing inaction. When the drugs are potent, the crime of mischief-making is superadded to the folly of empiricism.

"To place in a more prominent point of view the great value and importance of what may be termed the physiological, hygienic, or natural system of curing diseases, especially chronic diseases, in contradistinction to the pharmaceutical or empirical drug-plan generally prevalent.”—British and Foreign Medical Review, vol. xxi., p. 262, &c.

This last is the exact object of the present work, truly and pointly stated, and in endeavouring to accomplish which, we trust it may be in some measure successful.

The case against Drug Medication, as warranted by the evidence of Science and experience, may now be briefly summed up. The latter evidence indeed, has been supplied to us by men who were trained in Drug Schools, and spent the best years of their lives in the practice of the delusive systems that were

taught them, and yet in the maturity of their experience they have cried aloud with Saul-"Behold! I have played the fool, and have erred exceedingly!"

Drugging is opposed to Nature, because perfect Nutrition being the sole basis of perfect health, whatever does not conduce to Nutrition-whatever is not in itself Nutritive, cannot be good for man.

Imperfect Nutrition is not only disease, but a prolific source of disease, consequently what necessarily tends to render Nutrition more imperfect can never be rationally prescribed as remedial in disease.

As it is a natural impossibility for anything to contribute towards healthy Nutrition which the human system cannot assimilate to itself, as it can only assimilate food properly so called; and as Drug substances are not only incapable of being so assimilated, but are directly antagonistic to vitality, the use of such substances, from their very nature, must necessarily be productive of a greater or lesser amount of injury to man, and therefore never can be curative of disease.

The mischievous effects which have been demonstrably ascertained to follow the prescription of drugs are the derangement of the nutritive functions, nervous irritation, impurity of blood, the disturbance more or less of the organic action of the whole system, with a waste of vital energy in efforts to expel them from the system, and in addition to all this, the generation of new and distinct derangements of the bodily conditions which are known as Drug Diseases.

No system of practice based on the administration of Drugs can ever rank as Hygienic or Therapeutical, because, as the most eminent authorities concur in declaring-there is no proof whatever that any drug exerts any remedial influence over any disease, whereas as Dr. Wendell Holmes observes, "the presumption always is, that every noxious agent, including medicines proper, which hurts a well man, hurts a sick one.' - Annual Address Delivered before Massachussetts Medical Society. It is illogical and unphilosophical to argue from the fact of

Drugs having been taken without any injurious results becoming immediately apparent, that therefore they are not injurious, or to suppose that they are capable of producing beneficial effects.

It is also illogical and unphilosophical to argue from the fact of persons recovering from disease while under drug treatment that, therefore, the Drugs taken were the cause of the recovery; because, as Dr. Barklay, in his Medical Errors, remarks -“There is no argument more fallacious or more opposed to sound inductive reasoning than that which asserts the curative power of a remedy, because in ten, twenty, or even a hundred cases recovery followed its administration.” And he calls this

"the oldest, the most obstinate, the most univers il fallacy which has in all ages hindered, more than any other, the progress of knowledge, and has been the constant theme of logicians of all times the post hoc, ergo propter hoc-the belief that a sequence necessarily implies a relation of cause and effect."-Page 119.

It is equally illogical and unphilosophical to argue from the fact of some drugs being followed by peculiar effects on particular organs, that, therefore, those drugs must possess special curative affinities for diseases attacking those organs, because as, a host of authorities testify, experience proves that the diseases over which the particular drugs are assumed to exert special curative power, when let run their course, cease just as soon or rather sooner without them.

These conclusions are sustained by logical proofs extending over thousands of years-the whole history of medicine, in fact, being little else than a record of successive changes in its theories and practices, with nothing positive, nothing fixed or certain, to mark its progress and crown its labours as a Healing Art; while now its leading teachers and practitioners lament that "all is vanity and vexation of spirit;" that of Drug "Therapeutics as a trustworthy science, it is certain we have only the expectation;" and, consequently, that the system of Drug Medication, as at present practised, "has neither philosophy nor common sense to recommend it."—Dr. Trall in Medical Mirror, August, 1867.

And finally, on the candid consideration of the whole evidence, may not a conscientious verdict be given, in accordance with the conviction expressed by Dr. Wendell Holmes, in addressing his brethren of the Massachussetts Medical Society"I firmly believe that if the whole MATERIA MEDICA, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind-and all the worse for the fishes!"

The difference between Hydropathy and Physic-the same sources of knowledge open to both-The difference in the use made of them-Physic practice not based on the truths disclosed by Physiology and Pathology-Those truths perverted to sustain old theories-Errors in Practice the result of errors in Education-Responsibility of Medical teachers-Erroneous Pathology-Symptoms mistaken for diseases—Multiplication of diseases by names-Hydropathic and Physic practice contrasted in Fever.

SOUND views respecting the nature of disease is not only an essential preliminary to undertaking its cure, but also to the employment of such means of cure as are in accordance with the laws of Nature. The differences on these subjects between the Hydropathic system and that of Drug-Medication have been generally indicated in the two preceding chapters; but as the real character of those differences should be prominent in the mind of every one who desires to become thoroughly acquainted with the practical value of either system, it is necessary to go a little more into detail.

Physiology, we have stated, teaches the laws and operations of normal or healthy life, while a knowledge of the means by which we can best live in consistency with those laws, so as to maintain a state of perfect health, is termed Hygiene.

Pathology deals generally with diseased structures and conditions, the causes which induce morbid action, and the signs or symptoms by which those various causes make themselves