The Royal Road to Health | Page 9

problem before us by
declaring that, "Physicians have hurried thousands to their graves who
would have recovered if left to Nature." And again: "In scarlet fever
you have nothing to do but to rely on the vis medicatrix naturae."
Says Professor Gross: "Of the essence of disease very little is known;
indeed, nothing at all." And says Professor George B. Wood, M.D., of
Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia ("Wood's Practice of
Medicine"): "Efforts have been made to reach the elements of disease;
but not very successfully; because we have not yet learned the essential
nature of the healthy actions, and cannot understand their
derangements."

On the other side of the Atlantic the claims of the existing medical
schools to popular favor, do not appear to rest upon any surer basis than
they do here, if we may judge from the following opinions expressed
by some of the most eminent authorities in the British Kingdom:
"The medical practice of our days is, at the best, a most uncertain and
unsatisfactory system; it has neither philosophy nor common sense to
commend it to confidence." DR. EVANS, Fellow of the Royal College,
London.
"There has been a great increase of medical men of late, but, upon my
life, diseases have increased in proportion." JOHN ABERNETHY,
M.D., "The Good," of London.
"Gentlemen, ninety-nine out of every hundred medical facts are
medical lies; and medical doctrines are, for the most part, stark, staring
nonsense." Prof. GREGORY, of Edinburgh, author of a work on
"Theory and Practice of Physic."
"It cannot be denied that the present system of medicine is a burning
shame to its professors, if indeed a series of vague and uncertain
incongruities deserves to be called by that name. How rarely do our
medicines do good! How often do they make our patients really worse!
I fearlessly assert, that in most cases the sufferer would be safer without
a physician than with one. I have seen enough of the malpractice of my
professional. brethren to warrant the strong language I employ." Dr.
RAMAGE, Fellow of the Royal College, London.
"The present practice of medicine is a reproach to the name of Science,
while its professors give evidence of an almost total ignorance of the
nature and proper treatment of disease. Nine times out of ten, our
miscalled remedies are absolutely injurious to our patients, suffering
under diseases of whose real character and cause we are most culpably
ignorant." Prof. JAMEISON, of Edinburgh.
Assuredly the uncertain and most unsatisfactory art that we call
medical science, is no science at all, but a jumble of inconsistent
opinions; of conclusions hastily and often incorrectly drawn; of facts

misunderstood or perverted; of comparisons without analogy; of
hypotheses without reason, and theories not only useless, but
dangerous." Dublin Medical Journal.
"Some patients get well with the aid of medicine; more without it; and
still more in spite of it." SIR JOHN FORBES, M.D., F.R.S.
"Thousands are annually slaughtered in the quiet of the sick-room.'
Governments should at once either banish medical men, and proscribe
their blundering art, or they should adopt some better means to protect
the lives of the people than at present prevail, when they look far less
after the practice of this dangerous profession, and the murders
committed in it, than after the lowest trades." Dr FRANK, an eminent
author and practitioner.
"Our actual information or knowledge of disease does not increase in
proportion to our experimental practice. Every dose of medicine given
is a blind experiment upon the vitality of the patient." Dr. BOSTOCK,
author of "History of Medicine."
"The science of medicine is a barbarous jargon, and the effects of our
medicines on the human system in the highest degree uncertain; except,
indeed, that they have destroyed more lives than war, pestilence, and
famine combined." JOHN MASON GOOD, M.D., F.R.S., author of
"Book of Nature," "A System of Nosology," "Study of Medicine," etc.
"I declare as my conscientious conviction, founded on long experience
and reflection, that if there were not a single physician, surgeon, man
midwife, chemist, apothecary, druggist, nor drug on the face of the
earth, there would be less sickness and less mortality than now prevail."
JAS. JOHNSON, M.D., F.R.S., Editor of the Medico- Chirurgical
Review.
So it comes to this, that during three thousand years remedies have
been accumulating until between two and three thousand drugs are
recorded in the archives of the medical profession, and yet we have the
admission of some of the highest authorities on the subject that the
nature of disease is still a mystery, that the "modus operandi" of drugs

is equally obscure, and that in consequence there is profound
uncertainty as to the relation of drugs to the diseases for which they are
prescribed.
Can one cause cure another. Can a poison expel a poison? Can the
human