Medical Essays | Page 6

by others. The Essay called "Mechanism of Vital Actions" has been transferred to a distinct collection of Miscellaneous essays, forming a separate volume.
I had some intention of including with these papers an Essay on Intermittent Fever in New England, which received one of the Boylston prizes in 1837, and was published in the following year. But as this was upon a subject of local interest, chiefly, and would have taken up a good deal of room, I thought it best to leave it out, trusting that the stray copies to be met with in musty book-shops would sufficiently supply the not very extensive or urgent demand for a paper almost half a century old.
Some of these papers created a little stir when they first fell from the press into the pool of public consciousness. They will slide in very quietly now in this new edition, and find out for themselves whether the waters are those of Lethe, or whether they are to live for a time as not wholly unvalued reminiscences.
March 21, 1883.

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.
These Essays are old enough now to go alone without staff or crutch in the shape of Prefaces. A very few words may be a convenience to the reader who takes up the book and wishes to know what he is likely to find in it.
HOMOEOPATHY AND ITS KINDRED DELUSIONS.
Homoeopathy has proved lucrative, and so long as it continues to be so will surely exist,--as surely as astrology, palmistry, and other methods of getting a living out of the weakness and credulity of mankind and womankind. Though it has no pretensions to be considered as belonging among the sciences, it may be looked upon by a scientific man as a curious object of study among the vagaries of the human mind. Its influence for good or the contrary may be made a matter of calm investigation. I have studied it in the Essay before the reader, under the aspect of an extravagant and purely imaginative creation of its founder. Since that first essay was written, nearly half a century ago, we have all had a chance to witness its practical working. Two opposite inferences may be drawn from its doctrines and practice. The first is that which is accepted by its disciples. This is that all diseases are "cured" by drugs. The opposite conclusion is drawn by a much larger number of persons. As they see that patients are very commonly getting well under treatment by infinitesimal drugging, which they consider equivalent to no medication at all, they come to disbelieve in every form of drugging and put their whole trust in "nature." Thus experience,
"From seeming evil still educing good,"
has shown that the dealers in this preposterous system of pseudo- therapeutics have cooperated with the wiser class of practitioners in breaking up the system of over-dosing and over-drugging which has been one of the standing reproaches of medical practice. While. keeping up the miserable delusion that diseases were all to be "cured" by drugging, Homoeopathy has been unintentionally showing that they would very generally get well without any drugging at all. In the mean time the newer doctrines of the "mind cure," the "faith cure," and the rest are encroaching on the territory so long monopolized by that most ingenious of the pseudo-sciences. It would not be surprising if its whole ground should be taken possession of by these new claimants with their flattering appeals to the imaginative class of persons open to such attacks. Similia similabus may prove fatally true for once, if Homoeopathy is killed out by its new-born rivals.
It takes a very moderate amount of erudition to unearth a charlatan like the supposed father of the infinitesimal dosing system. The real inventor of that specious trickery was an Irishman by the name of Butler. The whole story is to be found in the "Ortus Medicinm" of Van Helmont. I have given some account of his chapter "Butler" in different articles, but I would refer the students of our Homoeopathic educational institutions to the original, which they will find very interesting and curious.
CURRENTS AND COUNTER-CURRENTS
My attack on over-drugging brought out some hostile comments and treatment. Thirty years ago I expressed myself with more vivacity than I should show if I were writing on the same subjects today. Some of my more lively remarks called out very sharp animadversion. Thus my illustration of prevention as often better than treatment in the mother's words to her child which had got a poisonous berry in its mouth,--"Spit it out!" gave mortal offence to a well-known New York practitioner and writer, who advised the Massachusetts Medical Society to spit out the offending speaker. Worse than this was my statement of my belief that if a ship-load of miscellaneous drugs, with certain very important exceptions,--drugs, many of