nothing more." What the experience of practitioners generally is worth has been already shown. Again:

"There are no authoritative statements as to the influence of any method of treatment, or as to the action of any remedy in the Pharmacopaia; and neither the College of Physicians, nor any of our medical societies, has made the slightest effort to obtain such a record.

We have no public or authoritative statement respecting the doses in which any medicine can be given with impunity, nor the disorders in which it proves useful; and, therefore, most practitioners do as they have been taught, and oftentimes have no knowledge as to its administration in any other doses. No person who has not made inquiries on the subject can have any idea of the wide discrepancy which exists, between the practice of different men, in relation to the doses in which remedies are administered. Ignorance respecting drugs and their actions is so general, that in the absence of authoritative statement on the subject, the vaguest and most groundless fears are entertained respecting their action."— British Medical Journal, Feb. 26, 1868.

Could there be a more convincing confession of the vain pretensions of the Drug School of Physic than Dr. Fuller thus favored the Harveian Society with? What a sorry burlesque on the grand claims of physic to the exactitude of a science! More than two thousand three hundred years ago, Hippocrates flourished, and laboured to place Therapeutics on a rational and natural basis; yet here we have learned Physicians meeting in solemn conclave, confessing their utter ignorance of Therapeutics, notwithstanding all their boasted "drug remedies," and appointing a committee to investigate the subject!

In the discussion that followed the reading of Dr. Fuller's paper, no two members appeared to have similar ideas about disease, drugs, or therapeutics; yet all seemed to be quite well satisfied with their own practice. Dr. Broadbent thought "the natural history of disease the first great problem to be ascertained." "The majority of men had never seen the "As it is, remedies

natural course of à disease." come into fashion, die out, and come in again. Remedies come and go, because men have no guide as to their real value except the opinion of the introducer." Are there not infallible guides to their non-value ?-guides that clearly and unequivocally lead

to the conclusive condemnation of all Drug Medication as worthless and mischievous ?-guides that unmistakably indicate nature and natural agents as alone valuable and reliable in the treatment of disease? But such guides drug practitioners will not follow, although their reckless experimentalism, at the expense of human life, invariably tends to demonstrate the complete fallacy of their drug theories.

Dr. Sutton, who followed Dr. Broadbent, admitted this. "Extensive and valuable experiments," he said, "have often been made with remedies, and certain results arrived at, which have been afterwards completely upset by finding that the disease over which the remedies were supposed to exert an influence ceased just as soon without them. He had seen a very large number of cases of pleurisy with effusion recover without any medicine at all; so with pneumonia; in cholera, too, under the most opposite plans of treatment, a certain number of cases. recover"—that is, Nature effects a cure in spite of doctors and their variety of drug remedies!

But while thus admitting the total uncertainty of Drug remedies-the utter helplessness of Drug practitioners in the presence of serious disease, and indirectly acknowledging the transcendent superiority of Nature—neither Dr. Fuller nor any one of his associates hinted at the propriety of bestowing a thought on natural Therapeutic Agents! Content to continue groping about bewildered in the darkness of their own wilful ignorance, still hoping against hope for some fortuitous gleam of remedial light, there was nothing but a monotonous reiteration of drugs, drugs, drugs, and a piteous bewailment of the want of precise knowledge concerning their actions! What hope can be reasonably entertained of improvement in Medicine while such a spirit of perverse adherence to an irrational system rules in the profession? There are none so blind as those who will not see, and really there is no hope save in the awakened intelligence of the public. Drug Doctors will continue to plod on contentedly, not ashamed to confess utter ignorance about the action of drug poisons administered daily, unconscious, per

of

haps, if not regardless, of the mischief inflicted-satisfied to do as they were taught, and follow blind-fold in the ways their predecessors. Verily it would seem that

"Ne'er did old Faith with her smooth bondage bind
Eyes more devoutly willing to be blind."

SECTION VI.-The general character of Medical Practice-High authorities quoted-Successive variations-Conscientiousness no palliation for the evils caused by Drug PractitionersPerversity of medical men in rejecting natural Therapeutic Agents-Their revival and successful progress notwithstanding medical opposition—Honest inquirers become zealous advo

cates-Conclusion.

FROM the evidence which has been adduced-and it could easily be increased to almost any extent-the conclusion is irresistibly forced on the mind, that the general character of medical practice is essentially speculative and necessarily dangerous. As Dr. Bostock, a highly-esteemed authority, has declared:"Every dose of medicine given is a blind experiment upon the vitality of the patient." It becomes, therefore, a serious matter when it is considered that there are some twenty thousand members of the medical profession in the United Kingdom, nineteen-twentieths of whom are actively engaged in the pernicious administration of Physic, or in making blind experiments on the vitality of their patients! Of how many of the twenty thousand could it be truthfully affirmed that they are “duly qualified" to administer physic-poison even with ordinary safety as regards health and life?-of how many would it be calumnious to declare that they are virtually pretenders to knowledge and skill which they do not possess, and in so far rank no higher than veritable empirics in practice-sacrificing to their false system innumerable credulous victims ?

This is not the language of exaggeration, as the evidence

already given fully testifies. It is more than justified by the declarations of additional medical authorities who know the profession well. "Charlatanism," says the Medical Critic and Psychological Journal, is by no means confined to illegal practice. To see the fullest-fledged charlatanism we need not go beyond the bounds of the profession. The most refined quacks stalk under cover of a legal qualification." "The Profession," observes one of its most esteemed members, Dr. Wilks, of Guy's Hospital, London, "is not injured by Morison or Holloway, but by those ten thousand worse charlatans, who, under sanction of the law, are eating away our vitals. Let us look to ourselves; the disease is an internal one."

Thus we have superadded to the essentially destructive character of Drug Medication in itself, a reckless charlatanism in practice, that necessarily increases its destructiveness. There is nothing settled and fixed in practice, and hence, says Sir Wm. Hamilton, "the history of medicine is, on the one hand, nothing less than a history of variations, and on the other, only a still more marvellous history of how every successive variation has, by medical bodies, been first furiously denounced, and then bigotedly adopted."

Now, what do such "successive variations" in the practice of physic really mean, but a successive variation in the modes employed for putting patients to death? Is not this an irresistible conclusion? Nay more, it is a conclusion insisted on by the highest medical authorities! "I am incessantly led," said Benjamin Bush, one of the most celebrated physicians of America, "to make an apology for the instability of the theories and practice of physic. Those physicians generally become the most eminent who have most thoroughly emancipated themselves from the tyranny of the schools of medicine. Dissections daily convince us of our ignorance of disease, and cause us to blush at our prescriptions. What mischiefs have we not done under the belief of false facts and false theories! We have assisted in multiplying diseases; we have done more we have increased their fatality!"

Another high authority, Dr. Coggswell of Boston, with equal candour observes-" I wish not to detract from the exalted profession to which I have the honour to belong, and which includes many of my warmest friends; yet it cannot answer to my conscience to withhold the acknowledgment of my firm belief, that the medical profession, with its prevailing mode of practice, is productive of more evil than good, and were it absolutely abolished, mankind would be infinitely the gainer." Thus

"Physic! a freak of times and modes,
Which yearly old mistakes explodes
For new ones still absurder.
All slay their victims disappear,
And only leaves the doctrine clear,
That killing is no murder !"

"We speak of things which we daily witness," says the British and Foreign Medical Review, January, 1838," and the effect on our minds is, the growing up of a belief, to which every year adds strength, that not a few invalids are annually destroyed by mal-practices, for which, if there is no moral excuse, there is, unfortunately, no legal punishment." In 1846, Dr. Sir John Forbes declared-"One of the besetting sins of English practitioners at present, is the habitual employment of powerful medicines, in a multitude of cases that do not require their use; mercury, iodine, colchicum, antimony, drastic purgatives, and excessive blood-letting, are frightfully misused in this manner."

In January, 1861, the Medico-Chirurgical Review said:"Would that some physician of mature experience had opened the academical year by a grave, unsparing exposure of the practices now in vogue, of poisoning the sick and feeble with food, which in quantity they vainly strive to digest, of spoiling blood that is healthy, of killing that which is disordered, of maddening the brain by wine, beer, and brandy without stintthus quenching the intellect in its last expiring rays, forestalling the unconsciousness of death, and dismissing the patient drunken from the world! This is but a reaction, we are told, from the