"... Argentea proles,
Auro deterior, fulvo pretiosior aere."
(Ovid)
Succeeding times a silver age behold
Excelling brass, but more excelled by Gold.
Hessiod, in his celebrated distribution of mankind, divides the species
into three orders of intellect.
"The first place," says he, "belongs to him who can, by his own powers,
discern what is fit and right, and penetrate to the remoter motives of
action.
"The second place is claimed by him who is willing to hear instruction
and can perceive right and wrong when they are shown to him by
another;--but he who hath neither acuteness nor docility--who can
neither find the way by himself, nor will be led by others, is a wretch
without use or value."
"You are seeking truth," quoth Adalbert von Chamisso, "_Remember that
the world clings more firmly to superstition than to faith_,"--or, to
borrow expression from an equally inspired source,--remember that
perverse humanity rarely fails to favour, rather, what Shakespeare terms
"_The seeming truth which cunning times put on to entrap the wisest._"
Courageous, then, must be the knight who sets his lance in rest to tilt
against the windmills of the world.
Nevertheless, although the truth is still banned as "heterodox" by
common consent--or tacit connivance--an attitude patent to commercial
instincts in view of the cataclysm which must naturally ensue, with
deadly results to the vested interests of orthodoxy, so soon as the
long-trusted barriers of plausible and pretentious mystery and
importance shall be swept away by the rising tide of popular
indignation. When the masses become educated to discriminate between
truth and falsehood and thus shall come into their rights, then and not
till then, will the dawn of physical salvation break.
Still, I maintain, there are, and have been all along the way, eminent
medical men of high intelligence, who, unlike the drones of the medical
hive, have dared to think for themselves and have even dared to speak
their thoughts.
Thus, for instance, spoke Sir William W. Gull, Physician to her late
Majesty Queen Victoria: "Having passed the period of the goldheaded cane
and horsehair wig, we dare hope to have also passed the days of pompous
emptiness; and furthermore, _we can hope that nothing will be considered
unworthy the attention of physicians which contributes to the saving of
life_."
Again, an authority of the first rank, Prof. Oesterlin, says in his
noted work on the Materia Medica:
"_The studious physician of our century will hardly expect to accomplish
by force, through some strange drug or other, that which only nature can
bring about when assisted by all the rational accessories of hygiene and
dietetics._
_Nature alone can furnish the beneficient means, sufficient for all
needs_,"--which the science of medicine never has afforded and never
can.
As we survey the civilization of our age and its medical science, we
see, on the one hand, the crude superstitions of the masses, the subtler
superstitions of the educated classes; gross materialism, bewildering
Darwinism, pessimism, and degenerate political economy; on the other
hand, unmitigated quackery and cupidity, with its weight of oppression
on humanity,--everywhere confusion instead of harmony.
Very surely,--and perhaps more speedily than we think--a reaction will
come, when our present degenerate system of medical subterfuge--misnamed
science--will have passed away, to be replaced by accredited methods of
natural healing consistent with the dignity of an enlightened,
self-respecting people.
"Ignorance is the curse of God:
Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven"
(Shakespeare)