"The most valuable medicines in the Materia Medica act on principles of

which we are totally ignorant. None have ever yet been able to explain

how opium produces sleep, or how bark cures intermittent fevers; and yet

few, it is hoped, will be so absurd as to desist from the use of these

important articles because they know nothing of the principle of their

operations." Or if the argument is preferred, in the eloquent language

of the Perkinistic poet:

"What though the CAUSES may not be explained,

Since these EFFECTS are duly ascertained,

Let not self-interest, prejudice, or pride,

Induce mankind to set the means aside;

Means which, though simple, are by

Heaven designed to alleviate the woes of human kind."

This course of argument is so often employed, that it deserves to be

expanded a little, so that its length and breadth may be fairly seen. A

series of what are called facts is brought forward to prove some very

improbable doctrine. It is objected by judicious people, or such as have

devoted themselves to analogous subjects, that these assumed facts are in

direct opposition to all that is known of the course of nature, that the

universal experience of the past affords a powerful presumption against

their truth, and that in proportion to the gravity of these objections,

should be the number and competence of the witnesses. The answer is a

ready one. What do we know of the mysteries of Nature? Do we understand

the intricate machinery of the Universe? When to this is added the

never-failing quotation,

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,"--

the question is thought to be finally disposed of.

Take the case of astrology as an example. It is in itself strange and

incredible that the relations of the heavenly bodies to each other at a

given moment of time, perhaps half a century ago, should have anything to

do with my success or misfortune in any undertaking of to-day. But what

right have I to say it cannot be so? Can I bind the sweet influences of

Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? I do not know by what mighty

magic the planets roll in their fluid paths, confined to circles as

unchanging as if they were rings of steel, nor why the great wave of

ocean follows in a sleepless round upon the skirts of moonlight; nor cam

I say from any certain knowledge that the phases of the heavenly bodies,

or even the falling of the leaves of the forest, or the manner in which

the sands lie upon the sea-shore, may not be knit up by invisible threads

with the web of human destiny. There is a class of minds much more ready

to believe that which is at first sight incredible, and because it is

incredible, than what is generally thought reasonable. Credo quia

impossibile est,--"I believe, because it is impossible,"--is an old

paradoxical expression which might be literally applied to this tribe of

persons. And they always succeed in finding something marvellous, to call

out the exercise of their robust faith. The old Cabalistic teachers

maintained that there was not a verse, line, word, or even letter in the

Bible which had not a special efficacy either to defend the person who

rightly employed it, or to injure his enemies; always provided the

original Hebrew was made use of. In the hands of modern Cabalists every

substance, no matter how inert, acquires wonderful medicinal virtues,

provided it be used in a proper state of purity and subdivision.

I have already mentioned the motives attributed by the Perkinists to the

Medical Profession, as preventing its members from receiving the new but

unwelcome truths. This accusation is repeated in different forms and

places, as, for instance, in the following passage: "Will the medical man

who has spent much money and labor in the pursuit of the arcana of

Physic, and on the exercise of which depends his support in life,

proclaim the inefficacy of his art, and recommend a remedy to his patient

which the most unlettered in society can employ as advantageously as

himself? and a remedy, too, which, unlike the drops, the pills, the

powders, etc., of the Materia Medica, is inconsumable, and ever in

readiness to be employed in successive diseases?"

As usual with these people, much indignation was expressed at any

parallel between their particular doctrine and practice and those of

their exploded predecessors. "The motives," says the disinterested Mr.

Perkins, "which must have impelled to this attempt at classing the

METALLIC PRACTICE with the most paltry of empyrical projects, are but too

thinly veiled to escape detection."

To all these arguments was added, as a matter of course, an appeal to the

feelings of the benevolent in behalf of suffering humanity, in the shape

of a notice that the poor would be treated gratis. It is pretty well

understood that this gratuitous treatment of the poor does not

necessarily imply an excess of benevolence, any more than the gratuitous

distribution of a trader's shop-bills is an evidence of remarkable

generosity; in short, that it is one of those things which honest men

often do from the best motives, but which rogues and impostors never fail

to announce as one of their special recommendations. It is astonishing

to see how these things brighten up at the touch of Mr. Perkins's poet:

"Ye worthy, honored, philanthropic few,

The muse shall weave her brightest wreaths for you,

Who in Humanity's bland cause unite,

Nor heed the shaft by interest aimed or spite;

Like the great Pattern of Benevolence,

Hygeia's blessings to the poor dispense;

And though opposed by folly's servile brood,

ENJOY THE LUXURY OF DOING GOOD."

Having thus sketched the history of Perkinism in its days of prosperity;

having seen how it sprung into being, and by what means it maintained its

influence, it only remains to tell the brief story of its discomfiture

and final downfall. The vast majority of the sensible part of the

medical profession were contented, so far as we can judge, to let it die

out of itself. It was in vain that the advocates of this invaluable

discovery exclaimed over their perverse and interested obstinacy,--in

vain that they called up the injured ghosts of Harvey, Galileo, and

Copernicus to shame that unbelieving generation; the Baillies and the

Heberdens,--men whose names have come down to us as synonymous with honor

and wisdom,--bore their reproaches in meek silence, and left them

unanswered to their fate. There were some others, however, who, believing

the public to labor under a delusion, thought it worth while to see

whether the charm would be broken by an open trial of its virtue, as

compared with that of some less hallowed formula. It must be remembered

that a peculiar value was attached to the Metallic Tractors, as made and

patented by Mr. Perkins. Dr. Haygarth, of Bath, performed various

experiments upon patients afflicted with different complaints,--the

patients supposing that the real five-guinea Tractors were employed.

Strange to relate, he obtained equally wonderful effects with Tractors of

lead and of wood; with nails, pieces of bone, slate pencil, and

tobacco-pipe. Dr. Alderson employed sham Tractors made of wood, and

produced such effects upon five patients that they returned solemn thanks

in church for their cures. A single specimen of these cases may stand

for all of them. Ann Hill had suffered for some months from pain in the

right arm and shoulder. The Tractors (wooden ones) were applied, and in

the space of five minutes she expressed herself relieved in the following

apostrophe: "Bless me! why, who could have thought it, that them little

things could pull the pain from one. Well, to be sure, the longer one

lives, the more one sees; ah, dear!"

These experiments did not result in the immediate extinction of

Perkinism. Doubtless they were a great comfort to many obstinate

unbelievers, and helped to settle some sceptical minds; but for the real

Perkinistic enthusiasts, it may be questioned whether they would at that

time have changed their opinion though one had risen from the dead to

assure them that it was an error. It perished without violence, by an

easy and natural process. Like the famous toy of Mongolfier, it rose by

means of heated air,--the fevered breath of enthusiastic ignorance,--and

when this grew cool, as it always does in a little while, it collapsed

and fell.

And now, on reviewing the whole subject, how shall we account for the

extraordinary prevalence of the belief in Perkinism among a portion of

what is supposed to be the thinking part of the community?

Could the cures have been real ones, produced by the principle of ANIMAL

MAGNETISM? To this it may be answered that the Perkinists ridiculed the

idea of approximating Mesmer and the founder of their own doctrine, that

nothing like the somnambulic condition seems to have followed the use of

the Tractors, and that neither the exertion of the will nor the powers of

the individual who operated seem to have been considered of any

consequence. Besides, the absolute neglect into which the Tractors soon

declined is good evidence that they were incapable of affording any

considerable and permanent relief in the complaints for the cure of which

they were applied.

Of course a large number of apparent cures were due solely to nature;

which is true under every form of treatment, orthodox or empirical. Of

course many persons experienced at least temporary relief from the strong

impression made upon their minds by this novel and marvellous method of

treatment.

Many, again, influenced by the sanguine hopes of those about them, like

dying people, who often say sincerely, from day to day, that they are

getting better, cheated themselves into a false and short-lived belief

that they were cured; and as happens in such cases, the public never knew

more than the first half of the story.

When it was said to the Perkinists, that whatever effects they produced

were merely through the imagination, they declared (like the advocates of

the ROYAL TOUCH and the UNGUENTUM ARMARIUM) that this explanation was

sufficiently disproved by the fact of numerous and successful cures which

had been witnessed in infants and brute animals. Dr. Haygarth replied to

this, that "in these cases it is not the Patient, but the Observer, who

is deceived by his own imagination," and that such may be the fact, we

have seen in the case of the good lady who thought she had conjured away

the spot from her friend's countenance, when it remained just as before.

As to the motives of the inventor and vender of the Tractors, the facts

must be allowed to speak for themselves. But when two little bits of

brass and iron are patented, as an invention, as the result of numerous

experiments, when people are led, or even allowed, to infer that they are

a peculiar compound, when they are artfully associated with a new and

brilliant discovery (which then happened to be Galvanism), when they are

sold at many hundred times their value, and the seller prints his opinion

that a Hospital will suffer inconvenience, "unless it possesses many sets

of the Tractors, and these placed in the hands of the patients to

practise on each other," one cannot but suspect that they were contrived

in the neighborhood of a wooden nutmeg factory; that legs of ham in that

region are not made of the best mahogany; and that such as buy their

cucumber seed in that vicinity have to wait for the fruit as long as the

Indians for their crop of gunpowder.

--------------------------

The succeeding lecture will be devoted to an examination of the doctrines

of Samuel Hahnemann and his disciples; doctrines which some consider new

and others old; the common title of which is variously known as

Ho-moeopathy, Homoe-op-athy, Homoeo-paith-y, or Hom'pathy, and the claims

of which are considered by some as infinitely important, and by many as

immeasurably ridiculous.

I wish to state, for the sake of any who may be interested in the

subject, that I shall treat it, not by ridicule, but by argument; perhaps

with great freedom, but with good temper and in peaceable language; with

very little hope of reclaiming converts, with no desire of making

enemies, but with a firm belief that its pretensions and assertions

cannot stand before a single hour of calm investigation.

II.

It may be thought that a direct attack upon the pretensions of

HOMOEOPATHY is an uncalled-for aggression upon an unoffending doctrine

and its peaceful advocates.

But a little inquiry will show that it has long assumed so hostile a

position with respect to the Medical Profession, that any trouble I, or

any other member of that profession, may choose to bestow upon it may be

considered merely as a matter of self-defence. It began with an attempt

to show the insignificance of all existing medical knowledge. It not

only laid claim to wonderful powers of its own, but it declared the

common practice to be attended with the most positively injurious

effects, that by it acute diseases are aggravated, and chronic diseases

rendered incurable. It has at various times brought forward collections

of figures having the air of statistical documents, pretending to show a

great proportional mortality among the patients of the Medical

Profession, as compared with those treated according to its own rules.

Not contented with choosing a name of classical origin for itself, it

invented one for the whole community of innocent physicians, assuring

them, to their great surprise, that they were all ALLOPATHISTS, whether

they knew it or not, and including all the illustrious masters of the

past, from Hippocrates down to Hunter, under the same gratuitous title.

The line, then, has been drawn by the champions of the new doctrine; they

have lifted the lance, they have sounded the charge, and are responsible

for any little skirmishing which may happen.

But, independently of any such grounds of active resistance, the subject

involves interests so disproportioned to its intrinsic claims, that it is

no more than an act of humanity to give it a public examination. If the

new doctrine is not truth, it is a dangerous, a deadly error. If it is a

mere illusion, and acquires the same degree of influence that we have

often seen obtained by other illusions, there is not one of my audience

who may not have occasion to deplore the fatal credulity which listened

to its promises.

I shall therefore undertake a sober examination of its principles, its

facts, and some points of its history. The limited time at my disposal

requires me to condense as much as possible what I have to say, but I

shall endeavor to be plain and direct in expressing it. Not one statement

shall be made which cannot be supported by unimpeachable reference: not

one word shall be uttered which I am not as willing to print as to speak.

I have no quibbles to utter, and I shall stoop to answer none; but, with

full faith in the sufficiency of a plain statement of facts and reasons,

I submit the subject to the discernment of my audience.

The question may be asked in the outset,--Have you submitted the

doctrines you are professing to examine to the test of long-repeated and

careful experiment; have you tried to see whether they were true or not?

To this I answer, that it is abundantly evident, from what has often

happened, that it would be of no manner of use for me to allege the

results of any experiments I might have instituted. Again and again have

the most explicit statements been made by the most competent persons of

the utter failure of all their trials, and there were the same abundant

explanations offered as used to be for the Unguentum Armarium and the

Metallic Tractors. I could by no possibility perform any experiments the

result of which could not be easily explained away so as to be of no

conclusive significance. Besides, as arguments in favor of Homoeopathy

are constantly addressed to the public in journals, pamphlets, and even

lectures, by inexperienced dilettanti, the same channel must be open to

all its opponents.

It is necessary, for the sake of those to whom the whole subject may be

new, to give in the smallest possible compass the substance of the

Homoeopathic Doctrine. Samuel Hahnemann, its founder, is a German

physician, now living in Paris, [Hahnemann died in 1843.] at the age of

eighty-seven years. In 1796 he published the first paper containing his

peculiar notions; in 1805 his first work on the subject; in 1810 his

somewhat famous "Organon of the Healing Art;" the next year what he

called the "Pure Materia Medica;" and in 1828 his last work, the

"Treatise on Chronic Diseases." He has therefore been writing at

intervals on his favorite subject for nearly half a century.

The one great doctrine which constitutes the basis of Homoeopathy as a

system is expressed by the Latin aphorism,

"SIMILIA SIBILIBUS CURANTUR,"

or like cures like, that is, diseases are cured by agents capable of

producing symptoms resembling those found in the disease under treatment.

A disease for Hahnemann consists essentially in a group of symptoms. The

proper medicine for any disease is the one which is capable of producing

a similar group of symptoms when given to a healthy person.

It is of course necessary to know what are the trains of symptoms excited

by different substances, when administered to persons in health, if any

such can be shown to exist. Hahnemann and his disciples give catalogues

of the symptoms which they affirm were produced upon themselves or others

by a large number of drugs which they submitted to experiment.

The second great fact which Hahnemann professes to have established is

the efficacy of medicinal substances reduced to a wonderful degree of

minuteness or dilution. The following account of his mode of preparing

his medicines is from his work on Chronic Diseases, which has not, I

believe, yet been translated into English. A grain of the substance, if

it is solid, a drop if it is liquid, is to be added to about a third part

of one hundred grains of sugar of milk in an unglazed porcelain capsule

which has had the polish removed from the lower part of its cavity by

rubbing it with wet sand; they are to be mingled for an instant with a

bone or horn spatula, and then rubbed together for six minutes; then the

mass is to be scraped together from the mortar and pestle, which is to

take four minutes; then to be again rubbed for six minutes. Four minutes

are then to be devoted to scraping the powder into a heap, and the second

third of the hundred grains of sugar of milk to be added. Then they are

to be stirred an instant and rubbed six minutes,--again to be scraped

together four minutes and forcibly rubbed six; once more scraped together

for four minutes, when the last third of the hundred grains of sugar of

milk is to be added and mingled by stirring with the spatula; six minutes

of forcible rubbing, four of scraping together, and six more (positively

the last six) of rubbing, finish this part of the process.

Every grain of this powder contains the hundredth of a grain of the

medicinal substance mingled with the sugar of milk. If, therefore, a

grain of the powder just prepared is mingled with another hundred grains

of sugar of milk, and the process just described repeated, we shall have

a powder of which every grain contains the hundredth of the hundredth, or

the ten thousandth part of a grain of the medicinal substance. Repeat

the same process with the same quantity of fresh sugar of milk, and every

grain of your powder will contain the millionth of a grain of the

medicinal substance. When the powder is of this strength, it is ready to

employ in the further solutions and dilutions to be made use of in

practice.

A grain of the powder is to be taken, a hundred drops of alcohol are to

be poured on it, the vial is to be slowly turned for a few minutes, until

the powder is dissolved, and two shakes are to be given to it. On this

point I will quote Hahnemann's own words. "A long experience and

multiplied observations upon the sick lead me within the last few years

to prefer giving only two shakes to medicinal liquids, whereas I formerly

used to give ten." The process of dilution is carried on in the same way

as the attenuation of the powder was done; each successive dilution with

alcohol reducing the medicine to a hundredth part of the quantity of that

which preceded it. In this way the dilution of the original millionth of

a grain of medicine contained in the grain of powder operated on is

carried successively to the billionth, trillionth, quadrillionth,

quintillionth, and very often much higher fractional divisions. A dose

of any of these medicines is a minute fraction of a drop, obtained by

moistening with them one or more little globules of sugar, of which

Hahnemann says it takes about two hundred to weigh a grain.

As an instance of the strength of the medicines prescribed by Hahnemann,

I will mention carbonate of lime. He does not employ common chalk, but

prefers a little portion of the friable part of an oystershell. Of this

substance, carried to the sextillionth degree, so much as one or two

globules of the size mentioned can convey is a common dose. But for

persons of very delicate nerves it is proper that the dilution should be

carried to the decillionth degree. That is, an important medicinal

effect is to be expected from the two hundredth or hundredth part of the

millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the

millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the

millionth of the millionth of a grain of oyster-shell. This is only the

tenth degree of potency, but some of his disciples profess to have

obtained palpable effects from "much higher dilutions."

The third great doctrine of Hahnemann is the following. Seven eighths at

least of all chronic diseases are produced by the existence in the system

of that infectious disorder known in the language of science by the

appellation of PSORA, but to the less refined portion of the community by

the name of ITCH. In the words of Hahnemann's "Organon," "This Psora is

the sole true and fundamental cause that produces all the other countless

forms of disease, which, under the names of nervous debility, hysteria,

hypochondriasis, insanity, melancholy, idiocy, madness, epilepsy, and

spasms of all kinds, softening of the bones, or rickets, scoliosis and

cyphosis, caries, cancer, fungua haematodes, gout,--yellow jaundice and

cyanosis, dropsy,--"

["The degrees of DILUTION must not be confounded with those of POTENCY.

Their relations may be seen by this table:

lst dilution,--One hundredth of a drop or grain.

2d " One ten thousandth.

3d " One millionth, marked I.

4th " One hundred millionth.

5th " One ten thousand millionth.

6th " One million millionth, or one billionth, marked II.

7th " One hundred billionth.

8th " One ten thousand billionth.

9th " One million billionth, or one trillionth, marked III.

10th " One hundred trillionth.

11th " One ten thousand trillionth.

12th " One million trillionth, or one quadrillionth, marked

IV.,--and so on indefinitely.

The large figures denote the degrees of POTENCY.]

"gastralgia, epistaxis, haemoptysis,--asthma and suppuration of the

lungs,--megrim, deafness, cataract and amaurosis,--paralysis, loss of

sense, pains of every kind, etc., appear in our pathology as so many

peculiar, distinct, and independent diseases."

For the last three centuries, if the same authority may be trusted, under

the influence of the more refined personal habits which have prevailed,

and the application of various external remedies which repel the

affection from the skin; Psora has revealed itself in these numerous

forms of internal disease, instead of appearing, as in former periods,

under the aspect of an external malady.

These are the three cardinal doctrines of Hahnemann, as laid down in

those standard works of Homoeopathy, the "Organon" and the "Treatise on

Chronic Diseases."

Several other principles may be added, upon all of which he insists with

great force, and which are very generally received by his disciples.

1. Very little power is allowed to the curative efforts of nature.

Hahnemann goes so far as to say that no one has ever seen the simple

efforts of nature effect the durable recovery of a patient from a chronic

disease. In general, the Homoeopathist calls every recovery which

happens under his treatment a cure.

2. Every medicinal substance must be administered in a state of the most

perfect purity, and uncombined with any other. The union of several

remedies in a single prescription destroys its utility, and, according to

the "Organon," frequently adds a new disease.

3. A large number of substances commonly thought to be inert develop

great medicinal powers when prepared in the manner already described; and

a great proportion of them are ascertained to have specific antidotes in

case their excessive effects require to be neutralized.

4. Diseases should be recognized, as far as possible, not by any of the

common names imposed upon them, as fever or epilepsy, but as individual

collections of symptoms, each of which differs from every other

collection.

5. The symptoms of any complaint must be described with the most minute

exactness, and so far as possible in the patient's own words. To

illustrate the kind of circumstances the patient is expected to record, I

will mention one or two from the 313th page of the "Treatise on Chronic

Diseases,"--being the first one at which I opened accidentally.

"After dinner, disposition to sleep; the patient winks."

"After dinner, prostration and feeling of weakness (nine days after

taking the remedy)."

This remedy was that same oyster-shell which is to be prescribed

"fractions of the sextillionth or decillionth degree." According to

Hahnemann, the action of a single dose of the size mentioned does not

fully display itself in some cases until twenty-four or even thirty days

after it is taken, and in such instances has not exhausted its good

effects until towards the fortieth or fiftieth day,--before which time it

would be absurd and injurious to administer a new remedy.

So much for the doctrines of Hahnemann, which have been stated without

comment, or exaggeration of any of their features, very much as any

adherent of his opinions might have stated them, if obliged to compress

them into so narrow a space.

Does Hahnemann himself represent Homoeopathy as it now exists? He

certainly ought to be its best representative, after having created it,

and devoted his life to it for half a century. He is spoken of as the

great physician of the time, in most, if not all Homoeopathic works. If

he is not authority on the subject of his own doctrines, who is? So far

as I am aware, not one tangible discovery in the so-called science has

ever been ascribed to any other observer; at least, no general principle

or law, of consequence enough to claim any prominence in Homoeopathic

works, has ever been pretended to have originated with any of his

illustrious disciples. He is one of the only two Homoeopathic writers

with whom, as I shall mention, the Paris publisher will have anything to

do upon his own account. The other is Jahr, whose Manual is little more

than a catalogue of symptoms and remedies. If any persons choose to

reject Hahnemann as not in the main representing Homoeopathy, if they

strike at his authority, if they wink out of sight his deliberate and

formally announced results, it is an act of suicidal rashness; for upon

his sagacity and powers of observation, and experience, as embodied in

his works, and especially in his Materia Medica, repose the foundations

of Homoeopathy as a practical system.

So far as I can learn from the conflicting statements made upon the

subject, the following is the present condition of belief.

1. All of any note agree that the law Similia similibus is the only

fundamental principle in medicine. Of course if any man does not agree

to this the name Homoeopathist can no longer be applied to him with

propriety.

2. The belief in and employment of the infinitesimal doses is general,

and in some places universal, among the advocates of Homoeopathy; but a

distinct movement has been made in Germany to get rid of any restriction

to the use of these doses, and to employ medicines with the same license

as other practitioners.

3. The doctrine of the origin of most chronic diseases in Psora,

notwithstanding Hahnemann says it cost him twelve years of study and

research to establish the fact and its practical consequences, has met

with great neglect and even opposition from very many of his own

disciples.

It is true, notwithstanding, that, throughout most of their writings

which I have seen, there runs a prevailing tone of great deference to

Hahnemann's opinions, a constant reference to his authority, a general

agreement with the minor points of his belief, and a pretence of

harmonious union in a common faith. [Those who will take the trouble to

look over Hull's Translation of Jahr's Manual may observe how little

comparative space is given to remedies resting upon any other authority

than that of Hahnemann.]

Many persons, and most physicians and scientific men, would be satisfied

with the statement of these doctrines, and examine them no further. They

would consider it vastly more probable that any observer in so fallacious

and difficult a field of inquiry as medicine had been led into error, or

walked into it of his own accord, than that such numerous and

extraordinary facts had really just come to light. They would feel a

right to exercise the same obduracy towards them as the French Institute

is in the habit of displaying when memoirs or models are offered to it

relating to the squaring of the circle or perpetual motion; which it is

the rule to pass over without notice. They would feel as astronomers and

natural philosophers must have felt when, some half a dozen years ago, an

unknown man came forward, and asked for an opportunity to demonstrate to

Arago and his colleagues that the moon and planets were at a distance of

a little more than a hundred miles from the earth. And so they would not

even look into Homoeopathy, though all its advocates should exclaim in

the words of Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins, vender of the Metallic

Tractors, that "On all discoveries there are persons who, without

descending to any inquiry into the truth, pretend to know, as it were by

intuition, that newly asserted facts are founded in the grossest errors."

And they would lay their heads upon their pillows with a perfectly clear

conscience, although they were assured that they were behaving in the

same way that people of old did towards Harvey, Galileo, and Copernicus,

the identical great names which were invoked by Mr. Benjamin Douglass

Perkins.

But experience has shown that the character of these assertions is not

sufficient to deter many, from examining their claims to belief. I

therefore lean but very slightly on the extravagance and extreme apparent

singularity of their pretensions. I might have omitted them, but on the

whole it seemed more just to the claims of my argument to suggest the

vast complication of improbabilities involved in the statements

enumerated. Every one must of course judge for himself as to the weight

of these objections, which are by no means brought forward as a proof of

the extravagance of Homoeopathy, but simply as entitled to a brief

consideration before the facts of the case are submitted to our scrutiny.

The three great asserted discoveries of Hahnemann are entirely

unconnected with and independent of each other. Were there any natural

relation between them it would seem probable enough that the discovery of

the first would have led to that of the others. But assuming it to be a

fact that diseases are cured by remedies capable of producing symptoms

like their own, no manifest relation exists between this fact and the

next assertion, namely, the power of the infinitesimal doses. And

allowing both these to be true, neither has the remotest affinity to the

third new doctrine, that which declares seven eighths of all chronic

diseases to be owing to Psora.

This want of any obvious relation between Hahnemann's three cardinal

doctrines appears to be self-evident upon inspection. But if, as is

often true with his disciples, they prefer the authority of one of their

own number, I will refer them to Dr. Trinks's paper on the present state

of Homoeopathy in Europe, with which, of course, they are familiar, as

his name is mentioned as one of the most prominent champions of their

faith, in their American official organ. It would be a fact without a

parallel in the history, not merely of medicine, but of science, that

three such unconnected and astonishing discoveries, each of them a

complete revolution of all that ages of the most varied experience had

been taught to believe, should spring full formed from the brain of a

single individual.

Let us look a moment at the first of his doctrines. Improbable though it

may seem to some, there is no essential absurdity involved in the

proposition that diseases yield to remedies capable of producing like

symptoms. There are, on the other hand, some analogies which lend a

degree of plausibility to the statement. There are well-ascertained

facts, known from the earliest periods of medicine, showing that, under

certain circumstances, the very medicine which, from its known effects,

one would expect to aggravate the disease, may contribute to its relief.

I may be permitted to allude, in the most general way, to the case in

which the spontaneous efforts of an overtasked stomach are quieted by the

agency of a drug which that organ refuses to entertain upon any terms.

But that every cure ever performed by medicine should have been founded

upon this principle, although without the knowledge of a physician; that

the Homoeopathic axiom is, as Hahnemann asserts, "the sole law of nature

in therapeutics," a law of which nothing more than a transient glimpse

ever presented itself to the innumerable host of medical observers, is a

dogma of such sweeping extent, and pregnant novelty, that it demands a

corresponding breadth and depth of unquestionable facts to cover its vast

pretensions.

So much ridicule has been thrown upon the pretended powers of the minute

doses that I shall only touch upon this point for the purpose of

conveying, by illustrations, some shadow of ideas far transcending the

powers of the imagination to realize. It must be remembered that these

comparisons are not matters susceptible of dispute, being founded on

simple arithmetical computations, level to the capacity of any

intelligent schoolboy. A person who once wrote a very small pamphlet

made some show of objecting to calculations of thus kind, on the ground

that the highest dilutions could easily be made with a few ounces of

alcohol. But he should have remembered that at every successive dilution

he lays aside or throws away ninety-nine hundredths of the fluid on which

he is operating, and that, although he begins with a drop, he only

prepares a millionth, billionth, trillionth, and similar fractions of it,

all of which, added together, would constitute but a vastly minute

portion of the drop with which he began. But now let us suppose we take

one single drop of the Tincture of Camomile, and that the whole of this

were to be carried through the common series of dilutions.

A calculation nearly like the following was made by Dr. Panvini, and may

be readily followed in its essential particulars by any one who chooses.

For the first dilution it would take 100 drops of alcohol.

For the second dilution it would take 10;000 drops, or about a pint.

For the third dilution it would take 100 pints.

For the fourth dilution it would take 10,000 pints, or more than 1,000

gallons, and so on to the ninth dilution, which would take ten billion

gallons, which he computed would fill the basin of Lake Agnano, a body of

water two miles in circumference. The twelfth dilution would of course

fill a million such lakes. By the time the seventeenth degree of

dilution should be reached, the alcohol required would equal in quantity

the waters of ten thousand Adriatic seas. Trifling errors must be

expected, but they are as likely to be on one side as the other, and any

little matter like Lake Superior or the Caspian would be but a drop in

the bucket.

Swallowers of globules, one of your little pellets, moistened in the

mingled waves of one million lakes of alcohol, each two miles in

circumference, with which had been blended that one drop of Tincture of

Camomile, would be of precisely the strength recommended for that

medicine in your favorite Jahr's Manual, "against the most sudden,

frightful, and fatal diseases!" [In the French edition of 1834, the

proper doses of the medicines are mentioned, and Camomile is marked IV.

Why are the doses omitted in Hull's Translation, except in three

instances out of the whole two hundred remedies, notwithstanding the

promise in the preface that "some remarks upon the doses used may be

found at the head of each medicine"? Possibly because it makes no

difference whether they are employed in one Homoeopathic dose or another;

but then it is very singular that such precise directions were formerly

given in the same work, and that Hahnemann's "experience" should have led

him to draw the nice distinctions we have seen in a former part of this

Lecture (p. 44).]

And proceeding on the common data, I have just made a calculation which

shows that this single drop of Tincture of Camomile, given in the

quantity ordered by Jahr's Manual, would have supplied every individual

of the whole human family, past and present, with more than five billion

doses each, the action of each dose lasting about four days.

Yet this is given only at the quadrillionth, or fourth degree of potency,

and various substances are frequently administered at the decillionth or

tenth degree, and occasionally at still higher attenuations with

professed medicinal results. Is there not in this as great an exception

to all the hitherto received laws of nature as in the miracle of the

loaves and fishes? Ask this question of a Homoeopathist, and he will

answer by referring to the effects produced by a very minute portion of

vaccine matter, or the extraordinary diffusion of odors. But the vaccine

matter is one of those substances called morbid poisons, of which it is a

peculiar character to multiply themselves, when introduced into the

system, as a seed does in the soil. Therefore the hundredth part of a

grain of the vaccine matter, if no more than this is employed, soon

increases in quantity, until, in the course of about a week, it is a

grain or more, and can be removed in considerable drops. And what is a

very curious illustration of Homoeopathy, it does not produce its most.

characteristic effects until it is already in sufficient quantity not

merely to be visible, but to be collected for further use. The

thoughtlessness which can allow an inference to be extended from a

product of disease possessing this susceptibility of multiplication when

conveyed into the living body, to substances of inorganic origin, such as

silex or sulphur, would be capable of arguing that a pebble may produce a

mountain, because an acorn can become a forest.

As to the analogy to be found between the alleged action of the

infinitely attenuated doses, and the effects of some odorous substances

which possess the extraordinary power of diffusing their imponderable

emanations through a very wide space, however it may be abused in

argument, and rapidly as it evaporates on examination, it is not like

that just mentioned, wholly without meaning. The fact of the vast

diffusion of some odors, as that of musk or the rose, for instance, has

long been cited as the most remarkable illustration of the divisibility

of matter, and the nicety of the senses. And if this were compared with

the effects of a very minute dose of morphia on the whole system, or the

sudden and fatal impression of a single drop of prussic acid, or, with

what comes still nearer, the poisonous influence of an atmosphere

impregnated with invisible malaria, we should find in each of these

examples an evidence of the degree to which nature, in some few

instances, concentrates powerful qualities in minute or subtile forms of

matter. But if a man comes to me with a pestle and mortar in his hand,

and tells me that he will take a little speck of some substance which

nobody ever thought to have any smell at all, as, for instance, a grain

of chalk or of charcoal, and that he will, after an hour or two of

rubbing and scraping, develop in a portion of it an odor which, if the

whole grain were used, would be capable of pervading an apartment, a

house, a village, a province, an empire, nay, the entire atmosphere of

this broad planet upon which we tread; and that from each of fifty or

sixty substances he can in this way develop a distinct and hitherto

unknown odor: and if he tries to show that all this is rendered quite

reasonable by the analogy of musk and roses, I shall certainly be

justified in considering him incapable of reasoning, and beyond the reach

of my argument. What if, instead of this, he professes to develop new

and wonderful medicinal powers from the same speck of chalk or charcoal,

in such proportions as would impregnate every pond, lake, river, sea, and

ocean of our globe, and appeals to the same analogy in favor of the

probability of his assertion.

All this may be true, notwithstanding these considerations. But so

extraordinary would be the fact, that a single atom of substances which a

child might swallow without harm by the teaspoonful could, by an easy

mechanical process, be made to develop such inconceivable powers, that

nothing but the strictest agreement of the most cautious experimenters,

secured by every guaranty that they were honest and faithful, appealing

to repeated experiments in public, with every precaution to guard against

error, and with the most plain and peremptory results, should induce us

to lend any credence to such pretensions.

The third doctrine, that Psora, the other name of which you remember, is

the cause of the great majority of chronic diseases, is a startling one,

to say the least. That an affection always recognized as a very

unpleasant personal companion, but generally regarded as a mere temporary

incommodity, readily yielding to treatment in those unfortunate enough to

suffer from it, and hardly known among the better classes of society,

should be all at once found out by a German physician to be the great

scourge of mankind, the cause of their severest bodily and mental

calamities, cancer and consumption, idiocy and madness, must excite our

unqualified surprise. And when the originator of this singular truth

ascribes, as in the page now open before me, the declining health of a

disgraced courtier, the chronic malady of a bereaved mother, even the

melancholy of the love-sick and slighted maiden, to nothing more nor less

than the insignificant, unseemly, and almost unmentionable ITCH, does it

not seem as if the very soil upon which we stand were dissolving into

chaos, over the earthquake-heaving of discovery?

And when one man claims to have established these three independent

truths, which are about as remote from each other as the discovery of the

law of gravitation, the invention of printing, and that of the mariner's

compass, unless the facts in their favor are overwhelming and unanimous,

the question naturally arises, Is not this man deceiving himself, or

trying to deceive others?

I proceed to examine the proofs of the leading ideas of Hahnemann and his

school.

In order to show the axiom, similia similibus curantur (or like is cured

by like), to be the basis of the healing art,--"the sole law of nature in

therapeutics,"--it is necessary,

1. That the symptoms produced by drugs in healthy persons should be

faithfully studied and recorded.

2. That drugs should be shown to be always capable of curing those

diseases most like their own symptoms.

3. That remedies should be shown not to cure diseases when they do not

produce symptoms resembling those presented in these diseases.

1. The effects of drugs upon healthy persons have been studied by

Hahnemann and his associates. Their results were made known in his

Materia Medica, a work in three large volumes in the French translation,

published about eight years ago. The mode of experimentation appears to

have been, to take the substance on trial, either in common or minute

doses, and then to set down every little sensation, every little movement

of mind or body, which occurred within many succeeding hours or days, as

being produced solely by the substance employed. When I have enumerated

some of the symptoms attributed to the power of the drugs taken, you will

be able to judge how much value is to be ascribed to the assertions of

such observers.

The following list was taken literally from the Materia Medica of

Hahnemann, by my friend M. Vernois, for whose accuracy I am willing to

be responsible. He has given seven pages of these symptoms, not

selected, but taken at hazard from the French translation of the work. I

shall be very brief in my citations.

"After stooping some time, sense of painful weight about the head upon

resuming the erect posture."

"An itching, tickling sensation at the outer edge of the palm of the left

hand, which obliges the person to scratch." The medicine was acetate of

lime, and as the action of the globule taken is said to last twenty-eight

days, you may judge how many such symptoms as the last might be supposed

to happen.

Among the symptoms attributed to muriatic acid are these: a catarrh,

sighing, pimples; "after having written a long time with the back a

little bent over, violent pain in the back and shoulder-blades, as if

from a strain,"--"dreams which are not remembered,--disposition to mental

dejection,--wakefulness before and after midnight."

I might extend this catalogue almost indefinitely. I have not cited

these specimens with any view to exciting a sense of the ridiculous,

which many others of those mentioned would not fail to do, but to show

that the common accidents of sensation, the little bodily inconveniences

to which all of us are subject, are seriously and systematically ascribed

to whatever medicine may have been exhibited, even in the minute doses I

have mentioned, whole days or weeks previously.

To these are added all the symptoms ever said by anybody, whether

deserving confidence or not, as I shall hereafter illustrate, to be

produced by the substance in question.

The effects of sixty-four medicinal substances, ascertained by one or

both of these methods, are enumerated in the Materia Medica of Hahnemann,

which may be considered as the basis of practical Homoeopathy. In the

Manual of Jahr, which is the common guide, so far as I know, of those who

practise Homoeopathy in these regions, two hundred remedies are

enumerated, many of which, however, have never been employed in practice.

In at least one edition there were no means of distinguishing those which

had been tried upon the sick from the others. It is true that marks have

been added in the edition employed here, which serve to distinguish them;

but what are we to think of a standard practical author on Materia

Medica, who at one time omits to designate the proper doses of his

remedies, and at another to let us have any means of knowing whether a

remedy has ever been tried or not, while he is recommending its

employment in the most critical and threatening diseases?

I think that, from what I have shown of the character of Hahnemann's

experiments, it would be a satisfaction to any candid inquirer to know

whether other persons, to whose assertions he could look with confidence,

confirm these pretended facts. Now there are many individuals, long and

well known to the scientific world, who have tried these experiments upon

healthy subjects, and utterly deny that their effects have at all

corresponded to Hahnemann's assertions.

I will take, for instance, the statements of Andral (and I am not

referring to his well-known public experiments in his hospital) as to the

result of his own trials. This distinguished physician is Professor of

Medicine in the School of Paris, and one of the most widely known and

valued authors upon practical and theoretical subjects the profession can

claim in any country. He is a man of great kindness of character, a most

liberal eclectic by nature and habit, of unquestioned integrity, and is

called, in the leading article of the first number of the "Homoepathic

Examiner," "an eminent and very enlightened allopathist." Assisted by a

number of other persons in good health, he experimented on the effects of

cinchona, aconite, sulphur, arnica, and the other most highly extolled

remedies. His experiments lasted a year, and he stated publicly to the

Academy of Medicine that they never produced the slightest appearance of

the symptoms attributed to them. The results of a man like this, so

extensively known as one of the most philosophical and candid, as well as

brilliant of instructors, and whose admirable abilities and signal

liberality are generally conceded, ought to be of great weight in

deciding the question.

M. Double, a well-known medical writer and a physician of high standing

in Paris, had occasion so long ago as 1801, before he had heard of

Homoeopathy, to make experiments upon Cinchona, or Peruvian bark. He and

several others took the drug in every kind of dose for four months, and

the fever it is pretended by Hahnemann to excite never was produced.

M. Bonnet, President of the Royal Society of Medicine of Bordeaux, had

occasion to observe many soldiers during the Peninsular War, who made use

of Cinchona as a preservative against different diseases, but he never

found it to produce the pretended paroxysms.

If any objection were made to evidence of this kind, I would refer to the

express experiments on many of the Homoeopathic substances, which were

given to healthy persons with every precaution as to diet and regimen, by

M. Louis Fleury, without being followed by the slightest of the pretended

consequences. And let me mention as a curious fact, that the same

quantity of arsenic given to one animal in the common form of the

unprepared powder, and to another after having been rubbed up into six

hundred globules, offered no particular difference of activity in the two

cases.

This is a strange contradiction to the doctrine of the development of

what they call dynamic power, by means of friction and subdivision.

In 1835 a public challenge was offered to the best known Homoeopathic

physician in Paris to select any ten substances asserted to produce the

most striking effects; to prepare them himself; to choose one by lot

without knowing which of them he had taken, and try it upon himself or

any intelligent and devoted Homoeopathist, and, waiting his own time, to

come forward and tell what substance had been employed. The challenge

was at first accepted, but the acceptance retracted before the time of

trial arrived.

From all this I think it fair to conclude that the catalogues of symptoms

attributed in Homoeopathic works to the influence of various drugs upon

healthy persons are not entitled to any confidence.

2. It is necessary to show, in the next place, that medicinal substances

are always capable of curing diseases most like their own symptoms. For

facts relating to this question we must look to two sources; the recorded

experience of the medical profession in general, and the results of

trials made according to Homoeopathic principles, and capable of testing

the truth of the doctrine.

No person, that I am aware of, has ever denied that in some cases there

exists a resemblance between the effects of a remedy and the symptoms of

diseases in which it is beneficial. This has been recognized, as

Hahnemann himself has shown, from the time of Hippocrates. But according

to the records of the medical profession, as they have been hitherto

interpreted, this is true of only a very small proportion of useful

remedies. Nor has it ever been considered as an established truth that

the efficacy of even these few remedies was in any definite ratio to

their power of producing symptoms more or less like those they cured.

Such was the state of opinion when Hahnemann came forward with the

proposition that all the cases of successful treatment found in the works

of all preceding medical writers were to be ascribed solely to the

operation of the Homoeopathic principle, which had effected the cure,

although without the physician's knowledge that this was the real secret.

And strange as it may seem, he was enabled to give such a degree of

plausibility to this assertion, that any person not acquainted somewhat

with medical literature, not quite familiar, I should rather say, with

the relative value of medical evidence, according to the sources whence

it is derived, would be almost frightened into the belief, at seeing the

pages upon pages of Latin names he has summoned as his witnesses.

It has hitherto been customary, when examining the writings of authors of

preceding ages, upon subjects as to which they were less enlightened than

ourselves, and which they were very liable to misrepresent, to exercise

some little discretion; to discriminate, in some measure, between writers

deserving confidence and those not entitled to it. But there is not the

least appearance of any such delicacy on the part of Hahnemann. A large

majority of the names of old authors he cites are wholly unknown to

science. With some of them I have been long acquainted, and I know that

their accounts of diseases are no more to be trusted than their

contemporary Ambroise Pare's stories of mermen, and similar absurdities.

But if my judgment is rejected, as being a prejudiced one, I can refer to

Cullen, who mentioned three of Hahnemann's authors in one sentence, as

being "not necessarily bad authorities; but certainly such when they

delivered very improbable events;" and as this was said more than half a

century ago, it could not have had any reference to Hahnemann. But

although not the slightest sign of discrimination is visible in his

quotations,--although for him a handful of chaff from Schenck is all the

same thing as a measure of wheat from Morgagni,--there is a formidable

display of authorities, and an abundant proof of ingenious researches to

be found in each of the great works of Hahnemann with which I am

familiar. [Some painful surmises might arise as to the erudition of

Hahnemann's English Translator, who makes two individuals of "Zacutus,

Lucitanus," as well as respecting that of the conductors of an American

Homoeopathic periodical, who suffer the name of the world-renowned

Cardanus to be spelt Cardamus in at least three places, were not this

gross ignorance of course attributable only to the printer.]

It is stated by Dr. Leo-Wolf, that Professor Joerg, of Leipsic, has

proved many of Hahnemann's quotations from old authors to be adulterate

and false. What particular instances he has pointed out I have no means

of learning. And it is probably wholly impossible on this side of the

Atlantic, and even in most of the public libraries of Europe, to find

anything more than a small fraction of the innumerable obscure

publications which the neglect of grocers and trunkmakers has spared to

be ransacked by the all-devouring genius of Homoeopathy. I have

endeavored to verify such passages as my own library afforded me the

means of doing. For some I have looked in vain, for want, as I am

willing to believe, of more exact references. But this I am able to

affirm, that, out of the very small number which I have been able, to

trace back to their original authors, I have found two to be wrongly

quoted, one of them being a gross misrepresentation.

The first is from the ancient Roman author, Caelius Aurelianus; the

second from the venerable folio of Forestus. Hahnemann uses the

following expressions,--if he is not misrepresented in the English

Translation of the 'Organon': "Asclepiades on one occasion cured an

inflammation of the brain by administering a small quantity of wine."

After correcting the erroneous reference of the Translator, I can find no

such case alluded to in the chapter. But Caelius Aurelianus mentions two

modes of treatment employed by Asclepiades, into both of which the use of

wine entered, as being "in the highest degree irrational and dangerous."

[Caelius Aurel. De Morb. Acut. et Chron. lib. I. cap. xv. not xvi.

Amsterdam. Wetstein, 1755.]

In speaking of the oil of anise-seed, Hahnemann says that Forestus

observed violent colic caused by its administration. But, as the author

tells the story, a young man took, by the counsel of a surgeon, an acrid

and virulent medicine, the name of which is not given, which brought on a

most cruel fit of the gripes and colic. After this another surgeon was

called, who gave him oil of anise-seed and wine, "which increased his

suffering." [Observ. et Curat. Med. lib. XXI obs. xiii. Frankfort,

1614.] Now if this was the Homoeopathic remedy, as Hahnemann pretends,

it might be a fair question why the young man was not cured by it. But

it is a much graver question why a man who has shrewdness and learning

enough to go so far after his facts, should think it right to treat them

with such astonishing negligence or such artful unfairness.

Even if every word he had pretended to take from his old authorities were

to be found in them, even if the authority of every one of these authors

were beyond question, the looseness with which they are used to prove

whatever Hahnemann chooses is beyond the bounds of credibility. Let me

give one instance to illustrate the character of this man's mind.

Hahnemann asserts, in a note annexed to the 110th paragraph of the

"Organon," that the smell of the rose will cause certain persons to

faint. And he says in the text that substances which produce peculiar

effects of this nature on particular constitutions cure the same symptoms

in people in general. Then in another note to the same paragraph he

quotes the following fact from one of the last sources one would have

looked to for medical information, the Byzantine Historians.

"It was by these means (i.e. Homoeopathically) that the Princess Eudosia

with rose-water restored a person who had fainted!"

Is it possible that a man who is guilty of such pedantic folly as

this,--a man who can see a confirmation of his doctrine in such a

recovery as this,--a recovery which is happening every day, from a breath

of air, a drop or two of water, untying a bonnet-string, loosening a

stay-lace, and which can hardly help happening, whatever is done,--is it

possible that a man, of whose pages, not here and there one, but hundreds

upon hundreds are loaded with such trivialities, is the Newton, the

Columbus, the Harvey of the nineteenth century!

The whole process of demonstration he employs is this. An experiment is

instituted with some drug upon one or more healthy persons. Everything

that happens for a number of days or weeks is, as we have seen, set down

as an effect of the medicine. Old volumes are then ransacked

promiscuously, and every morbid sensation or change that anybody ever

said was produced by the drug in question is added to the list of

symptoms. By one or both of these methods, each of the sixty-four

substances enumerated by Hahnemann is shown to produce a very large

number of symptoms, the lowest in his scale being ninety-seven, and the

highest fourteen hundred and ninety-one. And having made out this list

respecting any drug, a catalogue which, as you may observe in any

Homoeopathic manual, contains various symptoms belonging to every organ

of the body, what can be easier than to find alleged cures in every

medical author which can at once be attributed to the Homoeopathic

principle; still more if the grave of extinguished credulity is called

upon to give up its dead bones as living witnesses; and worst of all, if

the monuments of the past are to be mutilated in favor of "the sole law

of Nature in therapeutics"?

There are a few familiar facts of which great use has been made as an

entering wedge for the Homoeopathic doctrine. They have been suffered to

pass current so long that it is time they should be nailed to the

counter, a little operation which I undertake, with perfect cheerfulness,

to perform for them.

The first is a supposed illustration of the Homoeopathic law found in the

precept given for the treatment of parts which have been frozen, by

friction with snow or similar means. But we deceive ourselves by names,

if we suppose the frozen part to be treated by cold, and not by heat.

The snow may even be actually warmer than the part to which it is

applied. But even if it were at the same temperature when applied, it

never did and never could do the least good to a frozen part, except as a

mode of regulating the application of what? of heat. But the heat must

be applied gradually, just as food must be given a little at a time to

those perishing with hunger. If the patient were brought into a warm

room, heat would be applied very rapidly, were not something interposed

to prevent this, and allow its gradual admission. Snow or iced water is

exactly what is wanted; it is not cold to the part; it is very possibly

warm, on the contrary, for these terms are relative, and if it does not

melt and let the heat in, or is not taken away, the part will remain

frozen up until doomsday. Now the treatment of a frozen limb by heat, in

large or small quantities, is not Homoeopathy.

The next supposed illustration of the Homoeopathic law is the alleged

successful management of burns, by holding them to the fire. This is a

popular mode of treating those burns which are of too little consequence

to require any more efficacious remedy, and would inevitably get well of

themselves, without any trouble being bestowed upon them. It produces a

most acute pain in the part, which is followed by some loss of

sensibility, as happens with the eye after exposure to strong light, and

the ear after being subjected to very intense sounds. This is all it is

capable of doing, and all further notions of its efficacy must be

attributed merely to the vulgar love of paradox. If this example affords

any comfort to the Homoeopathist, it seems as cruel to deprive him of it

as it would be to convince the mistress of the smoke-jack or the flatiron

that the fire does not literally "draw the fire out," which is her

hypothesis.

But if it were true that frost-bites were cured by cold and burns by

heat, it would be subversive, so far as it went, of the great principle

of Homoeopathy.

For you will remember that this principle is that Like cures Like, and

not that Same cures Same; that there is resemblance and not identity

between the symptoms of the disease and those produced by the drug which

cures it, and none have been readier to insist upon this distinction than

the Homoeopathists themselves. For if Same cures Same, then every poison

must be its own antidote,--which is neither a part of their theory nor

their so-called experience. They have been asked often enough, why it

was that arsenic could not cure the mischief which arsenic had caused,

and why the infectious cause of small-pox did not remedy the disease it

had produced, and then the; were ready enough to see the distinction I

have pointed out. O no! it was not the hair of the same dog, but only of

one very much like him!

A third instance in proof of the Homoeopathic law is sought for in the

acknowledged efficacy of vaccination. And how does the law apply to

this? It is granted by the advocates of Homoeopathy that there is a

resemblance between the effects of the vaccine virus on a person in

health and the symptoms of small-pox. Therefore, according to the rule,

the vaccine virus will cure the small-pox, which, as everybody knows, is

entirely untrue. But it prevents small-pox, say the Homoeopathists.

Yes, and so does small-pox prevent itself from ever happening again, and

we know just as much of the principle involved in the one case as in the

other. For this is only one of a series of facts which we are wholly

unable to explain. Small-pox, measles, scarlet-fever, hooping-cough,

protect those who have them once from future attacks; but nettle-rash and

catarrh and lung fever, each of which is just as Homoeopathic to itself

as any one of the others, have no such preservative power. We are

obliged to accept the fact, unexplained, and we can do no more for

vaccination than for the rest.

I come now to the most directly practical point connected with the

subject, namely,--

What is the state of the evidence as to the efficacy of the proper

Homoeopathic treatment in the cure of diseases.

As the treatment adopted by the Homoeopathists has been almost

universally by means of the infinitesimal doses, the question of their

efficacy is thrown open, in common with that of the truth of their

fundamental axiom, as both are tested in practice.

We must look for facts as to the actual working of Homoeopathy to three

sources.

1. The statements of the unprofessional public.

2. The assertions of Homoeopathic practitioners.

3. The results of trials by competent and honest physicians, not pledged

to the system.

I think, after what we have seen of medical facts, as they are

represented by incompetent persons, we are disposed to attribute little

value to all statements of wonderful cures, coming from those who have

never been accustomed to watch the caprices of disease, and have not

cooled down their young enthusiasm by the habit of tranquil observation.

Those who know nothing of the natural progress of a malady, of its

ordinary duration, of its various modes of terminating, of its liability

to accidental complications, of the signs which mark its insignificance

or severity, of what is to be expected of it when left to itself, of how

much or how little is to be anticipated from remedies, those who know

nothing or next to nothing of all these things, and who are in a great

state of excitement from benevolence, sympathy, or zeal for a new medical

discovery, can hardly be expected to be sound judges of facts which have

misled so many sagacious men, who have spent their lives in the daily

study and observation of them. I believe that, after having drawn the

portrait of defunct Perkinism, with its five thousand printed cures, and

its million and a half computed ones, its miracles blazoned about through

America, Denmark, and England; after relating that forty years ago women

carried the Tractors about in their pockets, and workmen could not make

them fast enough for the public demand; and then showing you, as a

curiosity, a single one of these instruments, an odd one of a pair, which

I obtained only by a lucky accident, so utterly lost is the memory of all

their wonderful achievements; I believe, after all this, I need not waste

time in showing that medical accuracy is not to be looked for in the

florid reports of benevolent associations, the assertions of illustrious

patrons, the lax effusions of daily journals, or the effervescent gossip

of the tea-table.

Dr. Hering, whose name is somewhat familiar to the champions of

Homoeopathy, has said that "the new healing art is not to be judged by

its success in isolated cases only, but according to its success in

general, its innate truth, and the incontrovertible nature of its innate

principles."

We have seen something of "the incontrovertible nature of its innate

principles," and it seems probable, on the whole, that its success in

general must be made up of its success in isolated cases. Some attempts

have been made, however, to finish the whole matter by sweeping

statistical documents, which are intended to prove its triumphant success

over the common practice.

It is well known to those who have had the good fortune to see the

"Homoeopathic Examiner," that this journal led off, in its first number,

with a grand display of everything the newly imported doctrine had to

show for itself. It is well remarked, on the twenty-third page of this

article, that "the comparison of bills of mortality among an equal number

of sick, treated by divers methods, is a most poor and lame way to get at

conclusions touching principles of the healing art." In confirmation of

which, the author proceeds upon the twenty-fifth page to prove the

superiority of the Homoeopathic treatment of cholera, by precisely these

very bills of mortality. Now, every intelligent physician is aware that

the poison of cholera differed so much in its activity at different times

and, places, that it was next to impossible to form any opinion as to the

results of treatment, unless every precaution was taken to secure the

most perfectly corresponding conditions in the patients treated, and

hardly even then. Of course, then, a Russian Admiral, by the name of

Mordvinov, backed by a number of so-called physicians practising in

Russian villages, is singularly competent to the task of settling the

whole question of the utility of this or that kind of treatment; to prove

that, if not more than eight and a half per cent. of those attacked with

the disease perished, the rest owed their immunity to Hahnemann. I can

remember when more than a hundred patients in a public institution were

attacked with what, I doubt not, many Homoeopathic physicians (to say

nothing of Homoeopathic admirals) would have called cholera, and not one

of them died, though treated in the common way, and it is my firm belief

that, if such a result had followed the administration of the omnipotent

globules, it would have been in the mouth of every adept in Europe, from

Quin of London to Spohr of Gandersheim. No longer ago than yesterday, in

one of the most widely circulated papers of this city, there was

published an assertion that the mortality in several Homoeopathic

Hospitals was not quite five in a hundred, whereas, in what are called by

the writer Allopathic Hospitals, it is said to be eleven in a hundred. An

honest man should be ashamed of such an argumentum ad ignorantiam. The

mortality of a hospital depends not merely on the treatment of the

patients, but on the class of diseases it is in the habit of receiving,

on the place where it is, on the season, and many other circumstances.

For instance, there are many hospitals in the great cities of Europe that

receive few diseases of a nature to endanger life, and, on the other

hand, there are others where dangerous diseases are accumulated out of

the common proportion. Thus, in the wards of Louis, at the Hospital of

La Pitie, a vast number of patients in the last stages of consumption

were constantly entering, to swell the mortality of that hospital. It

was because he was known to pay particular attention to the diseases of

the chest that patients laboring under those fatal affections to an

incurable extent were so constantly coming in upon him. It is always a

miserable appeal to the thoughtlessness of the vulgar, to allege the

naked fact of the less comparative mortality in the practice of one

hospital or of one physician than another, as an evidence of the

superiority of their treatment. Other things being equal, it must always

be expected that those institutions and individuals enjoying to the

highest degree the confidence of the community will lose the largest

proportion of their patients; for the simple reason that they will

naturally be looked to by those suffering from the gravest class of

diseases; that many, who know that they are affected with mortal disease,

will choose to die under their care or shelter, while the subjects of

trifling maladies, and merely troublesome symptoms, amuse themselves to

any extent among the fancy practitioners. When, therefore, Dr.

Mublenbein, as stated in the "Homoeopathic Examiner," and quoted in

yesterday's "Daily Advertiser," asserts that the mortality among his

patients is only one per cent. since he has practised Homoeopathy,

whereas it was six per cent. when he employed the common mode of

practice, I am convinced by this, his own statement, that the citizens of

Brunswick, whenever they are seriously sick, take good care not to send

for Dr. Muhlenbein!

It is evidently impossible that I should attempt, within the compass of a

single lecture, any detailed examination of the very numerous cases

reported in the Homoeopathic Treatises and Journals. Having been in the

habit of receiving the French "Archives of Homoeopathic Medicine" until

the premature decease of that Journal, I have had the opportunity of

becoming acquainted somewhat with the style of these documents, and

experiencing whatever degree of conviction they were calculated to

produce. Although of course I do not wish any value to be assumed for my

opinion, such as it is, I consider that you are entitled to hear it. So

far, then, as I am acquainted with the general character of the cases

reported by the Homoeopathic physicians, they would for the most part be

considered as wholly undeserving a place in any English, French, or

American periodical of high standing, if, instead of favoring the

doctrine they were intended to support, they were brought forward to

prove the efficacy of any common remedy administered by any common

practitioner. There are occasional exceptions to this remark; but the

general truth of it is rendered probable by the fact that these cases are

always, or almost always, written with the single object of showing the

efficacy of the medicine used, or the skill of the practitioner, and it

is recognized as a general rule that such cases deserve very little

confidence. Yet they may sound well enough, one at a time, to those who

are not fully aware of the fallacies of medical evidence. Let me state a

case in illustration. Nobody doubts that some patients recover under

every form of practice. Probably all are willing to allow that a large

majority, for instance, ninety in a hundred, of such cases as a physician

is called to in daily practice, would recover, sooner or later, with more

or less difficulty, provided nothing were done to interfere seriously

with the efforts of nature.

Suppose, then, a physician who has a hundred patients prescribes to each

of them pills made of some entirely inert substance, as starch, for

instance. Ninety of them get well, or if he chooses to use such

language, he cures ninety of them. It is evident, according to the

doctrine of chances, that there must be a considerable number of

coincidences between the relief of the patient and the administration of

the remedy. It is altogether probable that there will happen two or

three very striking coincidences out of the whole ninety cases, in which

it would seem evident that the medicine produced the relief, though it

had, as we assumed, nothing to do with it. Now suppose that the

physician publishes these cases, will they not have a plausible

appearance of proving that which, as we granted at the outset, was

entirely false? Suppose that instead of pills of starch he employs

microscopic sugarplums, with the five' million billion trillionth part of

a suspicion of aconite or pulsatilla, and then publishes his successful

cases, through the leaden lips of the press, or the living ones of his

female acquaintances,--does that make the impression a less erroneous

one? But so it is that in Homoeopathic works and journals and gossip one

can never, or next to never, find anything but successful cases, which

might do very well as a proof of superior skill, did it not prove as much

for the swindling advertisers whose certificates disgrace so many of our

newspapers. How long will it take mankind to learn that while they listen

to "the speaking hundreds and units," who make the world ring with the

pretended triumphs they have witnessed, the "dumb millions" of deluded

and injured victims are paying the daily forfeit of their misplaced

confidence!

I am sorry to see, also, that a degree of ignorance as to the natural

course of diseases is often shown in these published cases, which,

although it may not be detected by the unprofessional reader, conveys an

unpleasant impression to those who are acquainted with the subject. Thus

a young woman affected with jaundice is mentioned in the German "Annals

of Clinical Homoeopathy" as having been cured in twenty-nine days by

pulsatilla and nux vomica. Rummel, a well-known writer of the same

school, speaks of curing a case of jaundice in thirty-four days by

Homoeopathic doses of pulsatilla, aconite, and cinchona. I happened to

have a case in my own household, a few weeks since, which lasted about

ten days, and this was longer than I have repeatedly seen it in hospital

practice, so that it was nothing to boast of.

Dr. Munneche of Lichtenburg in Saxony is called to a patient with

sprained ankle who had been a fortnight under the common treatment. The

patient gets well by the use of arnica in a little more than a month

longer, and this extraordinary fact is published in the French "Archives

of Homoeopathic Medicine."

In the same Journal is recorded the case of a patient who with nothing

more, so far as any proof goes, than inluenza, gets down to her shop upon

the sixth day.

And again, the cool way in which everything favorable in a case is set

down by these people entirely to their treatment, may be seen in a case

of croup reported in the "Homoeopathic Gazette" of Leipsic, in which

leeches, blistering, inhalation of hot vapor, and powerful internal

medicine had been employed, and yet the merit was all attributed to one

drop of some Homoeopathic fluid.

I need not multiply these quotations, which illustrate the grounds of an

opinion which the time does not allow me to justify more at length; other

such cases are lying open before me; there is no end to them if more were

wanted; for nothing is necessary but to look into any of the numerous

broken-down Journals of Homoeopathy, the volumes of which may be found on

the shelves of those curious in such matters.

A number of public trials of Homoeopathy have been made in different

parts of the world. Six of these are mentioned in the Manifesto of the

"Homoeopathic Examiner." Now to suppose that any trial can absolutely

silence people, would be to forget the whole experience of the past. Dr.

Haygarth and Dr. Alderson could not stop the sale of the five-guinea

Tractors, although they proved that they could work the same miracles

with pieces of wood and tobacco-pipe. It takes time for truth to operate

as well as Homoeopathic globules. Many persons thought the results of

these trials were decisive enough of the nullity of the treatment; those

who wish to see the kind of special pleading and evasion by which it is

attempted to cover results which, stated by the "Homoeopathic Examiner"

itself, look exceedingly like a miserable failure, may consult the

opening flourish of that Journal. I had not the intention to speak of

these public trials at all, having abundant other evidence on the point.

But I think it best, on the whole, to mention two of them in a few

words,--that instituted at Naples and that of Andral.

There have been few names in the medical profession, for the last half

century, so widely known throughout the world of science as that of M.

Esquirol, whose life was devoted to the treatment of insanity, and who

was without a rival in that department of practical medicine. It is from

an analysis communicated by him to the "Gazette Medicale de Paris" that I

derive my acquaintance with the account of the trial at Naples by Dr.

Panvini, physician to the Hospital della Pace. This account seems to be

entirely deserving of credit. Ten patients were set apart, and not

allowed to take any medicine at all,--much against the wish of the

Homoeopathic physician. All of them got well, and of course all of them

would have been claimed as triumphs if they had been submitted to the

treatment. Six other slight cases (each of which is specified) got well

under the Homoeopathic treatment, none of its asserted specific effects

being manifested.

All the rest were cases of grave disease; and so far as the trial, which

was interrupted about the fortieth day, extended, the patients grew

worse, or received no benefit. A case is reported on the page before me

of a soldier affected with acute inflammation in the chest, who took

successively aconite, bryonia, nux vomica, and pulsatilla, and after

thirty-eight days of treatment remained without any important change in

his disease. The Homoeopathic physician who treated these patients was

M. de Horatiis, who had the previous year been announcing his wonderful

cures. And M. Esquirol asserted to the Academy of Medicine in 1835, that

this M. de Horatiis, who is one of the prominent personages in the

"Examiner's" Manifesto published in 1840, had subsequently renounced

Homoeopathy. I may remark, by the way, that this same periodical, which

is so very easy in explaining away the results of these trials, makes a

mistake of only six years or a little more as to the time when this at

Naples was instituted.

M. Andral, the "eminent and very enlightened allopathist" of the

"Homoeopathic Examiner," made the following statement in March, 1835, to

the Academy of Medicine: "I have submitted this doctrine to experiment; I

can reckon at this time from one hundred and thirty to one hundred and

forty cases, recorded with perfect fairness, in a great hospital, under

the eye of numerous witnesses; to avoid every objection--I obtained my

remedies of M. Guibourt, who keeps a Homoeopathic pharmacy, and whose

strict exactness is well known; the regimen has been scrupulously

observed, and I obtained from the sisters attached to the hospital a

special regimen, such as Hahnemann orders. I was told, however, some

months since, that I had not been faithful to all the rules of the

doctrine. I therefore took the trouble to begin again; I have studied

the practice of the Parisian Homoeopathists, as I had studied their

books, and I became convinced that they treated their patients as I had

treated mine, and I affirm that I have been as rigorously exact in the

treatment as any other person."

And he expressly asserts the entire nullity of the influence of all the

Homoeopathic remedies tried by him in modifying, so far as he could

observe, the progress or termination of diseases. It deserves notice

that he experimented with the most boasted substances,--cinchona,

aconite, mercury, bryonia, belladonna. Aconite, for instance, he says he

administered in more than forty cases of that collection of feverish

symptoms in which it exerts so much power, according to Hahnemann, and in

not one of them did it have the slightest influence, the pulse and heat

remaining as before.

These statements look pretty honest, and would seem hard to be explained

away, but it is calmly said that he "did not know enough of the method to

select the remedies with any tolerable precision." ["Homoeopathic

Examiner, vol. i. p. 22.]

"Nothing is left to the caprice of the physician." (In a word, instead

of being dependent upon blind chance, that there is an infallible law,

guided by which; the physician MUST select the proper remedies.')

['Ibid.,' in a notice of Menzel's paper.] Who are they that practice

Homoeopathy, and say this of a man with the Materia Medica of Hahnemann

lying before him? Who are they that send these same globules, on which

he experimented, accompanied by a little book, into families, whose

members are thought competent to employ them, when they deny any such

capacity to a man whose life has been passed at the bedside of patients,

the most prominent teacher in the first Medical Faculty in the world, the

consulting physician of the King of France, and one of the most renowned

practical writers, not merely of his nation, but of his age? I leave the

quibbles by which such persons would try to creep out from under the

crushing weight of these conclusions to the unfortunates who suppose that

a reply is equivalent to an answer.

Dr. Baillie, one of the physicians in the great Hotel Dieu of Paris,

invited two Homoeopathic practitioners to experiment in his wards. One of

these was Curie, now of London, whose works are on the counters of some

of our bookstores, and probably in the hands of some of my audience.

This gentleman, whom Dr. Baillie declares to be an enlightened man, and

perfectly sincere in his convictions, brought his own medicines from the

pharmacy which furnished Hahnemann himself, and employed them for four or

five months upon patients in his ward, and with results equally

unsatisfactory, as appears from Dr. Baillie's statement at a meeting of

the Academy of Medicine. And a similar experiment was permitted by the

Clinical Professor of the Hotel Dieu of Lyons, with the same complete

failure.

But these are old and prejudiced practitioners. Very well, then take the

statement of Dr. Fleury, a most intelligent young physician, who treated

homoeopathically more than fifty patients, suffering from diseases which

it was not dangerous to treat in this way, taking every kind of

precaution as to regimen, removal of disturbing influences, and the state

of the atmosphere, insisted upon by the most vigorous partisans of the

doctrine, and found not the slightest effect produced by the medicines.

And more than this, read nine of these cases, which he has published, as

I have just done, and observe the absolute nullity of aconite,

belladonna, and bryonia, against the symptoms over which they are

pretended to exert such palpable, such obvious, such astonishing

influences. In the view of these statements, it is impossible not to

realize the entire futility of attempting to silence this asserted

science by the flattest and most peremptory results of experiment. Were

all the hospital physicians of Europe and America to devote themselves,

for the requisite period, to this sole pursuit, and were their results to

be unanimous as to the total worthlessness of the whole system in

practice, this slippery delusion would slide through their fingers

without the slightest discomposure, when, as they supposed, they had

crushed every joint in its tortuous and trailing body.

3. I have said, that to show the truth of the Homoeopathic doctrine, as

announced by Hahnemann, it would be necessary to show, in the third

place, that remedies never cure diseases when they are not capable of

producing similar symptoms! The burden of this somewhat comprehensive

demonstration lying entirely upon the advocates of this doctrine, it may

be left to their mature reflections.

It entered into my original plan to treat of the doctrine relating to

Psora, or itch,--an almost insane conception, which I am glad to get rid

of, for this is a subject one does not care to handle without gloves. I

am saved this trouble, however, by finding that many of the disciples of

Hahnemann, those disciples the very gospel of whose faith stands upon his

word, make very light of his authority on this point, although he himself

says, "It has cost me twelve years of study and research to trace out the

source of this incredible number of chronic affections, to discover this

great truth, which remained concealed from all my predecessors and

contemporaries, to establish the basis of its demonstration, and find

out, at the same time, the curative medicines that were fit to combat

this hydra in all its different forms."

But, in the face of all this, the following remarks are made by Wolff, of

Dresden, whose essays, according to the editor of the "Homoeopathic

Examiner," "represent the opinions of a large majority of Homoeopathists

in Europe."

"It cannot be unknown to any one at all familiar with Homoeopathic

literature, that Hahnemann's idea of tracing the large majority of

chronic diseases to actual itch has met with the greatest opposition from

Homoeopathic physicians themselves." And again, "If the Psoric theory

has led to no proper schism, the reason is to be found in the fact that

it is almost without any influence in practice."

We are told by Jahr, that Dr. Griesselich, "Surgeon to the Grand Duke of

Baden," and a "distinguished" Homoeopathist, actually asked Hahnemann for

the proof that chronic diseases, such as dropsy, for instance, never

arise from any other cause than itch; and that, according to common

report, the venerable sage was highly incensed (fort courrouce) with Dr.

Hartmann, of Leipsic, another "distinguished" Homoeopathist, for

maintaining that they certainly did arise from other causes.

And Dr. Fielitz, in the "Homoeopathic Gazette" of Leipsic, after saying,

in a good-natured way, that Psora is the Devil in medicine, and that

physicians are divided on this point into diabolists and exorcists,

declares that, according to a remark of Hahnemann, the whole civilized

world is affected with Psora. I must therefore disappoint any advocate

of Hahnemann who may honor me with his presence, by not attacking a

doctrine on which some of the disciples of his creed would be very happy

to have its adversaries waste their time and strength. I will not meddle

with this excrescence, which, though often used in time of peace, would

be dropped, like the limb of a shell-fish, the moment it was assailed;

time is too precious, and the harvest of living extravagances nods too

heavily to my sickle, that I should blunt it upon straw and stubble.

I will close the subject with a brief examination of some of the

statements made in Homoeopathic works, and more particularly in the

brilliant Manifesto of the "Examiner," before referred to. And first, it

is there stated under the head of "Homoeopathic Literature," that "SEVEN

HUNDRED volumes have been issued from the press developing the

peculiarities of the system, and many of them possessed of a scientific

character that savans know well how to respect." If my assertion were

proper evidence in the case, I should declare, that, having seen a good

many of these publications, from the year 1834, when I bought the work of

the Rev. Thomas Everest, [Dr. Curie speaks of this silly pamphlet as

having been published in 1835.] to within a few weeks, when I received my

last importation of Homaeopathic literature, I have found that all, with

a very few exceptions, were stitched pamphlets varying from twenty or

thirty pages to somewhat less than a hundred, and generally resembling

each other as much as so many spelling-books.

But not being evidence in the case, I will give you the testimony of Dr.

Trinks, of Dresden, who flourishes on the fifteenth page of the same

Manifesto as one of the most distinguished among the Homoeopathists of

Europe. I translate the sentence literally from the "Archives de la

Medecine Homoeopathique."

"The literature of Homoeopathy, if that honorable name must be applied to

all kinds of book-making, has been degraded to the condition of the

humblest servitude. Productions without talent, without spirit, without

discrimination, flat and pitiful eulogies, exaggerations surpassing the

limits of the most robust faith, invectives against such as dared to

doubt the dogmas which had been proclaimed, or catalogues of remedies; of

such materials is it composed! From distance to distance only, have

appeared some memoirs useful to science or practice, which appear as so

many green oases in the midst of this literary desert."

It is a very natural as well as a curious question to ask, What has been

the success of Homoeopathy in the different countries of Europe, and what

is its present condition?

The greatest reliance of the advocates of Homoeopathy is of course on

Germany. We know very little of its medical schools, its medical

doctrines, or its medical men, compared with those of England and France.

And, therefore, when an intelligent traveller gives a direct account from

personal inspection of the miserable condition of the Homoeopathic

hospital at Leipsic, the first established in Europe, and the first on

the list of the ever-memorable Manifesto, it is easy enough answer or

elude the fact by citing various hard names of "distinguished"

practitioners, which sound just as well to the uninformed public as if

they were Meckel, or Tiedemann, or Langenbeck. Dr. Leo-Wolf, who, to be

sure, is opposed to Homoeopathy, but who is a scholar, and ought to know

something of his own countrymen, assures us that "Dr. Kopp is the only

German Homoeopathist, if we can call him so, who has been distinguished

as an author and practitioner before he examined this method." And Dr.

Lee, the same gentleman in whose travels the paragraph relating to the

Leipsic Hospital is to be found, says the same thing. And I will

cheerfully expose myself to any impertinent remark which it might

suggest, to assure my audience that I never heard or saw one authentic

Homoeopathic name of any country in Europe, which I had ever heard

mentioned before as connected with medical science by a single word or

deed sufficient to make it in any degree familiar to my ears, unless

Arnold of Heidelberg is the anatomist who discovered a little nervous

centre, called the otic ganglion. But you need ask no better proof of

who and what the German adherents of this doctrine must be, than the

testimony of a German Homoeopathist as to the wretched character of the

works they manufacture to enforce its claims.

As for the act of this or that government tolerating or encouraging

Homoeopathy, every person of common intelligence knows that it is a mere

form granted or denied according to the general principles of policy

adopted in different states, or the degree of influence which some few

persons who have adopted it may happen to have at court. What may be the

value of certain pompous titles with which many of the advocates of

Homoeopathy are honored, it might be disrespectful to question. But in

the mean time the judicious inquirer may ponder over an extract which I

translate from a paper relating to a personage well known to the

community as Williams the Oculist, with whom I had the honor of crossing

the Atlantic some years since, and who himself handed me two copies of

the paper in question.

"To say that he was oculist of Louis XVIII. and of Charles X., and that

he now enjoys the same title with respect to His Majesty, Louis Philippe,

and the King of the Belgians, is unquestionably to say a great deal; and

yet it is one of the least of his titles to public confidence. His

reputation rests upon a basis more substantial even than the numerous

diplomas with which he is provided, than the membership of the different

medical societies which have chosen him as their associate," etc., etc.

And as to one more point, it is time that the public should fully

understand that the common method of supporting barefaced imposture at

the present day, both in Europe and in this country, consists in trumping

up "Dispensaries," "Colleges of Health," and other advertising charitable

clap-traps, which use the poor as decoy-ducks for the rich, and the

proprietors of which have a strong predilection for the title of

"Professor." These names, therefore, have come to be of little or no

value as evidence of the good character, still less of the high

pretensions of those who invoke their authority. Nor does it follow, even

when a chair is founded in connection with a well-known institution, that

it has either a salary or an occupant; so that it may be, and probably

is, a mere harmless piece of toleration on the part of the government if

a Professorship of Homoeopathy is really in existence at Jena or

Heidelberg. And finally, in order to correct the error of any who might

suppose that the whole Medical Profession of Germany has long since

fallen into the delusions of Hahnemann, I will quote two lines which a

celebrated anatomist and surgeon (whose name will occur again in this

lecture in connection with a very pleasing letter) addressed to the

French Academy of Medicine in 1835. "I happened to be in Germany some

months since, at a meeting of nearly six hundred physicians; one of them

wished to bring up the question of Homoeopathy; they would not even

listen to him." This may have been very impolite and bigoted, but that

is not precisely the point in reference to which I mention the

circumstance.

But if we cannot easily get at Germany, we can very easily obtain exact

information from France and England. I took the trouble to write some

months ago to two friends in Paris, in whom I could place confidence, for

information upon the subject. One of them answered briefly to the effect

that nothing was said about it. When the late Curator of the Lowell

Institute, at his request, asked about the works upon the subject, he was

told that they had remained a long time on the shelves quite unsalable,

and never spoken of.

The other gentleman, [Dr. Henry T. Bigelow, now Professor of Surgery in

Harvard University] whose name is well known to my audience, and who

needs no commendation of mine, had the kindness to procure for me many

publications upon the subject, and some information which sets the whole

matter at rest, so far as Paris is concerned. He went directly to the

Baillieres, the principal and almost the only publishers of all the

Homoeopathic books and journals in that city. The following facts were

taken by him from the account-books of this publishing firm. Four

Homoeopathic Journals have been published in Paris; three of them by the

Baillieres.

The reception they met with may be judged of by showing the number of

subscribers to each on the books of the publishing firm.

A Review published by some other house, which lasted one year, and had

about fifty subscribers, appeared in 1834, 1835.

There were only four Journals of Homoeopathy ever published in Paris. The

Baillieres informed my correspondent that the sale of Homoeopathic books

was much less than formerly, and that consequently they should undertake

to publish no new books upon the subject, except those of Jahr or

Hahnemann. "This man," says my correspondent,--referring to one of the

brothers,--"the publisher and headquarters of Homoeopathy in Paris,

informs me that it is going down in England and Germany as well as in

Paris." For all the facts he had stated he pledged himself as

responsible.

Homoeopathy was in its prime in Paris, he said, in 1836 and 1837, and

since then has been going down.

Louis told my correspondent that no person of distinction in Paris had

embraced Homoeopathy, and that it was declining. If you ask who Louis

is, I refer you to the well-known Homoeopathist, Peschier of Geneva, who

says, addressing him, "I respect no one more than yourself; the feeling

which guides your researches, your labors, and your pen, is so honorable

and rare, that I could not but bow down before it; and I own, if there

were any allopathist who inspired me with higher veneration, it would be

him and not yourself whom I should address."

Among the names of "Distinguished Homoeopathists," however, displayed in

imposing columns, in the index of the "Homoeopathic Examiner," are those

of MARJOLIN, AMUSSAT, and BRESCHET, names well known to the world of

science, and the last of them identified with some of the most valuable

contributions which anatomical knowledge has received since the

commencement of the present century. One Dr. Chrysaora, who stands

sponsor for many facts in that Journal, makes the following statement

among the rest: "Professors, who are esteemed among the most

distinguished of the Faculty (Faculty de Medicine), both as to knowledge

and reputation, have openly confessed the power of Homoeopathia in forms

of disease where the ordinary method of practice proved totally

insufficient. It affords me the highest pleasure to select from among

these gentlemen, Marjolin, Amussat, and Breschet."

Here is a literal translation of an original letter, now in my

possession, from one of these Homoeopathists to my correspondent:--

"DEAR SIR, AND RESPECTED PROFESSIONAL BROTHER:

"You have had the kindness to inform me in your letter that a new

American Journal, the 'New World,' has made use of my name in support of

the pretended Homoeopathic doctrines, and that I am represented as one of

the warmest partisans of Homoeopathy in France.

"I am vastly surprised at the reputation manufactured for me upon the new

continent; but I am obliged, in deference to truth, to reject it with my

whole energy. I spurn far from me everything which relates to that

charlatanism called Homoeopathy, for these pretended doctrines cannot

endure the scrutiny of wise and enlightened persons, who are guided by

honorable sentiments in the practice of the noblest of arts.

"PARIS, 3d November, 1841

"I am, etc., etc.,

"G. BRESCHET,

"Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, Member of the Institute, Surgeon

of Hotel Dieu, and Consulting Surgeon to the King, etc." [I first saw M.

Breschet's name mentioned in that Journal]

Concerning Amussat, my correspondent writes, that he was informed by

Madame Hahnemann, who converses in French more readily than her husband,

and therefore often speaks for him, that "he was not a physician, neither

Homoeopathist nor Allopathist, but that he was the surgeon of their own

establishment; that is, performed as a surgeon all the operations they

had occasion for in their practice."

I regret not having made any inquiries as to Marjolin, who, I doubt not,

would strike his ponderous snuff-box until it resounded like the Grecian

horse, at hearing such a doctrine associated with his respectable name.

I was not aware, when writing to Paris, that this worthy Professor, whose

lectures I long attended, was included in these audacious claims; but

after the specimens I have given of the accuracy of the foreign

correspondence of the "Homoeopathic Examiner," any further information I

might obtain would seem so superfluous as hardly to be worth the postage.

Homoeopathy may be said, then, to be in a sufficiently miserable

condition in Paris. Yet there lives, and there has lived for years, the

illustrious Samuel Hahnemann, who himself assured my correspondent that

no place offered the advantages of Paris in its investigation, by reason

of the attention there paid to it.

In England, it appears by the statement of Dr. Curie in October, 1839,

about eight years after its introduction into the country, that there

were eighteen Homoeopathic physicians in the United Kingdom, of whom only

three were to be found out of London, and that many of these practised

Homoeopathy in secret.

It will be seen, therefore, that, according to the recent statement of

one of its leading English advocates, Homoeopathy had obtained not quite

half as many practical disciples in England as Perkinism could show for

itself in a somewhat less period from the time of its first promulgation

in that country.

Dr. Curie's letter, dated London, October 30, 1839, says there is "one in

Dublin, Dr. Luther; at Glasgow, Dr. Scott." The "distinguished"

Chrysaora writes from Paris, dating October 20, 1839, "On the other hand,

Homoeopathy is commencing to make an inroad into England by the way of

Ireland. At Dublin, distinguished physicians have already embraced the

new system, and a great part of the nobility and gentry of that city have

emancipated themselves from the English fashion and professional

authority."

But the Marquis of Anglesea and Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer patronize

Homoeopathy; the Queen Dowager Adelaide has been treated by a

Homoeopathic physician. "Jarley is the delight of the nobility and

gentry." "The Royal Family are the patrons of Jarley."

Let me ask if a Marquis and a Knight are better than two Lords, and if

the Dowager of Royalty is better than Royalty itself, all of which

illustrious dignities were claimed in behalf of Benjamin Douglass

Perkins?

But if the balance is thought too evenly suspended in this case, another

instance can be given in which the evidence of British noblemen and their

ladies is shown to be as valuable in establishing the character of a

medical man or doctrine, as would be the testimony of the Marquis of

Waterford concerning the present condition and prospects of missionary

enterprise. I have before me an octavo volume of more than four hundred

pages, in which, among much similar matter, I find highly commendatory

letters from the Marchioness of Ormond, Lady Harriet Kavanagh, the

Countess of Buckinghamshire, the Right Hon. Viscount Ingestre, M. P., and

the Most Noble, the Marquis of Sligo,--all addressed to "John St. John

Long, Esq," a wretched charlatan, twice tried for, and once convicted of,

manslaughter at the Old Bailey.

This poor creature, too, like all of his tribe, speaks of the medical

profession as a great confederation of bigoted monopolists. He, too,

says that "If an innovator should appear, holding out hope to those in

despair, and curing disorders which the faculty have recorded as

irremediable, he is at once, and without inquiry, denounced as an empiric

and an impostor." He, too, cites the inevitable names of Galileo and

Harvey, and refers to the feelings excited by the great discovery of

Jenner. From the treatment of the great astronomer who was visited with

the punishment of other heretics by the ecclesiastical authorities of a

Catholic country some centuries since, there is no very direct inference

to be drawn to the medical profession of the present time. His name

should be babbled no longer, after having been placarded for the

hundredth time in the pages of St. John Long. But if we are doomed to

see constant reference to the names of Harvey and Jenner in every

worthless pamphlet containing the prospectus of some new trick upon the

public, let us, once for all, stare the facts in the face, and see how

the discoveries of these great men were actually received by the medical

profession.

In 1628, Harvey published his first work upon the circulation. His

doctrines were a complete revolution of the prevailing opinions of all

antiquity. They immediately found both champions and opponents; of which

last, one only, Riolanus, seemed to Harvey worthy of an answer, on

account of his "rank, fame, and learning." Controversy in science, as in

religion, was not, in those days, carried on with all the courtesy which

our present habits demand, and it is possible that some hard words may

have been applied to Harvey, as it is very certain that he used the most

contemptuous expressions towards others.

Harvey declares in his second letter to Riolanus, "Since the first

discovery of the circulation, hardly a day, or a moment, has passed

without my hearing it both well and ill spoken of; some attack it with

great hostility, others defend it with high encomiums; one party believe

that I have abundantly proved the truth of the doctrine against all the

weight of opposing arguments, by experiments, observations, and

dissections; others think it not yet sufficiently cleared up, and free

from objections." Two really eminent Professors, Plempius of Louvain,

and Walaeus of Leyden, were among its early advocates.

The opinions sanctioned by the authority of long ages, and the names of

Hippocrates and Galen, dissolved away, gradually, but certainly, before

the demonstrations of Harvey. Twenty-four years after the publication of

his first work, and six years before his death, his bust in marble was

placed in the Hall of the College of Physicians, with a suitable

inscription recording his discoveries.

Two years after this he was unanimously invited to accept the Presidency

of that body; and he lived to see his doctrine established, and all

reputable opposition withdrawn.

There were many circumstances connected with the discovery of Dr. Jenner

which were of a nature to excite repugnance and opposition. The practice

of inoculation for the small-pox had already disarmed that disease of

many of its terrors. The introduction of a contagious disease from a

brute creature into the human system naturally struck the public mind

with a sensation of disgust and apprehension, and a part of the medical

public may have shared these feelings. I find that Jenner's discovery of

vaccination was made public in June, 1798. In July of the same year the

celebrated surgeon, Mr. Cline, vaccinated a child with virus received

from Dr. Jenner, and in communicating the success of this experiment, he

mentions that Dr. Lister, formerly of the Small-Pox Hospital, and

himself, are convinced of the efficacy of the cow-pox. In November of

the same year, Dr. Pearson published his "Inquiry," containing the

testimony of numerous practitioners in different parts of the kingdom, to

the efficacy of the practice. Dr. HAYGARTH, who was so conspicuous in

exposing the follies of Perkinism, was among the very earliest to express

his opinion in favor of vaccination. In 1801, Dr. Lettsom mentions the

circumstance "as being to the honor of the medical professors, that they

have very generally encouraged this salutary practice, although it is

certainly calculated to lessen their pecuniary advantages by its tendency

to extirpate a fertile source of professional practice."

In the same year the Medical Committee of Paris spoke of vaccination in a

public letter, as "the most brilliant and most important discovery of the

eighteenth century." The Directors of a Society for the Extermination of

the Small-Pox, in a Report dated October 1st, 1807, "congratulate the

public on the very favorable opinion which the Royal College of

Physicians of London, after a most minute and laborious investigation

made by the command of his Majesty, have a second time expressed on the

subject of vaccination, in their Report laid before the House of Commons,

in the last session of Parliament; in consequence of which the sum of

twenty thousand pounds was voted to Dr. Jenner, as a remuneration for his

discovery, in addition to ten thousand pounds before granted." (In June,

1802.)

These and similar accusations, so often brought up against the Medical

Profession, are only one mode in which is manifested a spirit of

opposition not merely to medical science, but to all science, and to all

sound knowledge. It is a spirit which neither understands itself nor the

object at which it is aiming. It gropes among the loose records of the

past, and the floating fables of the moment, to glean a few truths or

falsehoods tending to prove, if they prove anything, that the persons who

have passed their lives in the study of a branch of knowledge the very

essence of which must always consist in long and accurate observation,

are less competent to judge of new doctrines in their own department than

the rest of the community. It belongs to the clown in society, the

destructive in politics, and the rogue in practice.

The name of Harvey, whose great discovery was the legitimate result of

his severe training and patient study, should be mentioned only to check

the pretensions of presumptuous ignorance. The example of Jenner, who

gave his inestimable secret, the result of twenty-two years of experiment

and researches, unpurchased, to the public,--when, as was said in

Parliament, he might have made a hundred thousand pounds by it as well as

any smaller sum,--should be referred to only to rebuke the selfish

venders of secret remedies, among whom his early history obliges us

reluctantly to record Samuel Hahnemann. Those who speak of the great body

of physicians as if they were united in a league to support the

superannuated notions of the past against the progress of improvement,

have read the history of medicine to little purpose. The prevalent

failing of this profession has been, on the contrary, to lend a too

credulous ear to ambitious and plausible innovators. If at the present

time ten years of public notoriety have passed over any doctrine

professing to be of importance in medical science, and if it has not

succeeded in raising up a powerful body of able, learned, and ingenious

advocates for its claims, the fault must be in the doctrine and not in

the medical profession.

Homoeopathy has had a still more extended period of trial than this, and

we have seen with what results. It only remains to throw out a few

conjectures as to the particular manner in which it is to break up and

disappear.

1. The confidence of the few believers in this delusion will never

survive the loss of friends who may die of any acute disease, under a

treatment such as that prescribed by Homoeopathy. It is doubtful how far

cases of this kind will be trusted to its tender mercies, but wherever it

acquires any considerable foothold, such cases must come, and with them

the ruin of those who practise it, should any highly valued life be thus

sacrificed.

2. After its novelty has worn out, the ardent and capricious individuals

who constitute the most prominent class of its patrons will return to

visible doses, were it only for the sake of a change.

3. The Semi-Homoeopathic practitioner will gradually withdraw from the

rotten half of his business and try to make the public forget his

connection with it.

4. The ultra Homoeopathist will either recant and try to rejoin the

medical profession; or he will embrace some newer and if possible equally

extravagant doctrine; or he will stick to his colors and go down with his

sinking doctrine. Very few will pursue the course last mentioned.

A single fact may serve to point out in what direction there will

probably be a movement of the dissolving atoms of Homoeopathy. On the

13th page of the too frequently cited Manifesto of the "Examiner" I read

the following stately paragraph:

"Bigelius, M. D., physician to the Emperor of Russia, whose elevated

reputation is well known in Europe, has been an acknowledged advocate of

Hahnemann's doctrines for several years. He abandoned Allopathia for

Homoeopathia." The date of this statement is January, 1840. I find on

looking at the booksellers' catalogues that one Bigel, or Bigelius, to

speak more classically, has been at various times publishing Homoeopathic

books for some years.

Again, on looking into the "Encyclographie des Sciences Medicales" for

April, 1840, I find a work entitled "Manual of HYDROSUDOPATHY, or the

Treatment of Diseases by Cold Water, etc., etc., by Dr. Bigel, Physician

of the School of Strasburg, Member of the Medico-Chirurgical Institute of

Naples, of the Academy of St. Petersburg,--Assessor of the College of

the Empire of Russia, Physician of his late Imperial Highness the Grand

Duke Constantine, Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, etc." Hydrosudopathy

or Hydropathy, as it is sometimes called, is a new medical doctrine or

practice which has sprung up in Germany since Homoeopathy, which it bids

fair to drive out of the market, if, as Dr. Bigel says, fourteen

physicians afflicted with diseases which defied themselves and their

colleagues came to Graefenberg, in the year 1836 alone, and were cured.

Now Dr. Bigel, "whose elevated reputation is well known in Europe,"

writes as follows: "The reader will not fail to see in this defence of

the curative method of Graefenberg a profession of medical faith, and he

will be correct in so doing." And his work closes with the following

sentence, worthy of so distinguished an individual: "We believe, with

religion, that the water of baptism purifies the soul from its original

sin; let us believe also, with experience, that it is for our corporeal

sins the redeemer of the human body." If Bigel, Physician to the late

Grand Duke Constantine, is identical with Bigel whom the "Examiner" calls

Physician to the Emperor of Russia, it appears that he is now actively

engaged in throwing cold water at once upon his patients and the future

prospects of Homoeopathy.

If, as must be admitted, no one of Hahnemann's doctrines is received with

tolerable unanimity among his disciples, except the central axiom,

Similia similibus curantur; if this axiom itself relies mainly for its

support upon the folly and trickery of Hahnemann, what can we think of

those who announce themselves ready to relinquish all the accumulated

treasures of our art, to trifle with life upon the strength of these

fantastic theories? What shall we think of professed practitioners of

medicine, if, in the words of Jahr, "from ignorance, for their personal

convenience, or through charlatanism, they treat their patients one day

Homoeopathically and the next Allopathically;" if they parade their

pretended new science before the unguarded portion of the community; if

they suffer their names to be coupled with it wherever it may gain a

credulous patient; and deny all responsibility for its character, refuse

all argument for its doctrines, allege no palliation for the ignorance

and deception interwoven with every thread of its flimsy tissue, when

they are questioned by those competent to judge and entitled to an

answer?

Such is the pretended science of Homoeopathy, to which you are asked to

trust your lives and the lives of those dearest to you. A mingled mass

of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel erudition, of imbecile credulity, and of

artful misrepresentation, too often mingled in practice, if we may trust

the authority of its founder, with heartless and shameless imposition.

Because it is suffered so often to appeal unanswered to the public,

because it has its journals, its patrons, its apostles, some are weak

enough to suppose it can escape the inevitable doom of utter disgrace and

oblivion. Not many years can pass away before the same curiosity excited

by one of Perkins's Tractors will be awakened at the sight of one of the

Infinitesimal Globules. If it should claim a longer existence, it can

only be by falling into the hands of the sordid wretches who wring their

bread from the cold grasp of disease and death in the hovels of ignorant

poverty.

As one humble member of a profession which for more than two thousand

years has devoted itself to the pursuit of the best earthly interests of

mankind, always assailed and insulted from without by such as are

ignorant of its infinite perplexities and labors, always striving in

unequal contest with the hundred-armed giant who walks in the noonday,

and sleeps not in the midnight, yet still toiling, not merely for itself

and the present moment, but for the race and the future, I have lifted my

voice against this lifeless delusion, rolling its shapeless bulk into the

path of a noble science it is too weak to strike, or to injure.

THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF PUERPERAL FEVER

Printed in 1843; reprinted with additions, 1855.

THE POINT AT ISSUE.

THE AFFIRMATIVE.

"The disease known as Puerperal Fever is so far contagious as to be

frequently carried from patient to patient by physicians and nurses."

O. W. Holmes, 1843.

THE NEGATIVE.

"The result of the whole discussion will, I trust, serve, not only to

exalt your views of the value and dignity of our profession, but to

divest your minds of the overpowering dread that you can ever become,

especially to woman, under the extremely interesting circumstances of

gestation and parturition, the minister of evil; that you can ever

convey, in any possible manner, a horrible virus, so destructive in its

effects, and so mysterious in its operations as that attributed to

puerperal fever."--Professor Hodge, 1852.

"I prefer to attribute them to accident, or Providence, of which I can

form a conception, rather than to a contagion of which I cannot form any

clear idea, at least as to this particular malady."--Professor Meigs,

1852.

" . . . in the propagation of which they have no more to do, than with

the propagation of cholera from Jessore to San Francisco, and from

Mauritius to St. Petersburg."--Professor Meigs, 1854.

---------------------

"I arrived at that certainty in the matter, that I could venture to

foretell what women would be affected with the disease, upon hearing by

what midwife they were to be delivered, or by what nurse they were to be

attended, during their lying-in; and, almost in every instance, my

prediction was verified."--Gordon, 1795.

"A certain number of deaths is caused every year by the contagion of

puerperal fever, communicated by the nurses and medical attendants."

Farr, in Fifth Annual Report of Registrar-General of England, 1843.

". . . boards of health, if such exist, or, without them, the medical

institutions of a country, should have the power of coercing, or of

inflicting some kind of punishment on those who recklessly go from cases

of puerperal fevers to parturient or puerperal females, without using due

precaution; and who, having been shown the risk, criminally encounter it,

and convey pestilence and death to the persons they are employed to aid

in the most interesting and suffering period of female existence."

--Copland's Medical Dictionary, Art. Puerperal States and Diseases, 1852.

"We conceive it unnecessary to go into detail to prove the contagious

nature of this disease, as there are few, if any, American practitioners

who do not believe in this doctrine."--Dr. Lee, in Additions to Article

last cited.

-----------------------

[INTRODUCTORY NOTE.] It happened, some years ago, that a discussion arose

in a Medical Society of which I was a member, involving the subject of a

certain supposed cause of disease, about which something was known, a

good deal suspected, and not a little feared. The discussion was

suggested by a case, reported at the preceding meeting, of a physician

who made an examination of the body of a patient who had died with

puerperal fever, and who himself died in less than a week, apparently in

consequence of a wound received at the examination, having attended

several women in confinement in the mean time, all of whom, as it was

alleged, were attacked with puerperal fever.

Whatever apprehensions and beliefs were entertained, it was plain that a

fuller knowledge of the facts relating to the subject would be acceptable

to all present. I therefore felt that it would be doing a good service

to look into the best records I could find, and inquire of the most

trustworthy practitioners I knew, to learn what experience had to teach

in the matter, and arrived at the results contained in the following

pages.

The Essay was read before the Boston Society for Medical Improvement,

and, at the request of the Society, printed in the "New England Quarterly

Journal of Medicine and Surgery" for April, 1843. As this Journal never

obtained a large circulation, and ceased to be published after a year's

existence, and as the few copies I had struck off separately were soon

lost sight of among the friends to whom they were sent, the Essay can

hardly be said to have been fully brought before the Profession.

The subject of this Paper has the same profound interest for me at the

present moment as it had when I was first collecting the terrible

evidence out of which, as it seems to me, the commonest exercise of

reason could not help shaping the truth it involved. It is not merely on

account of the bearing of the question,--if there is a question,--on all

that is most sacred in human life and happiness, that the subject cannot

lose its interest. It is because it seems evident that a fair statement

of the facts must produce its proper influence on a very large proportion

of well-constituted and unprejudiced minds. Individuals may, here and

there, resist the practical bearing of the evidence on their own feelings

or interests; some may fail to see its meaning, as some persons may be

found who cannot tell red from green; but I cannot doubt that most

readers will be satisfied and convinced, to loathing, long before they

have finished the dark obituary calendar laid before them.

I do not know that I shall ever again have so good an opportunity of

being useful as was granted me by the raising of the question which

produced this Essay. For I have abundant evidence that it has made many

practitioners more cautious in their relations with puerperal females,

and I have no doubt it will do so still, if it has a chance of being

read, though it should call out a hundred counterblasts, proving to the

satisfaction of their authors that it proved nothing. And for my part, I

had rather rescue one mother from being poisoned by her attendant, than

claim to have saved forty out of fifty patients to whom I had carried the

disease. Thus, I am willing to avail myself of any hint coming from

without to offer this paper once more to the press. The occasion has

presented itself, as will be seen, in a convenient if not in a flattering

form.