One thing is certain. A loud outcry on a slight touch reveals the weak spot in a profession, as well as in a patient. It is a doubtful policy to oppose the freest speech in those of our own number who are trying to show us where they honestly believe our weakness lies.
Vast as are the advances of our Science and Art, may it not possibly prove on examination that we retain other old barbarisms beside the use of the astrological sign of Jupiter, with which we endeavor to insure good luck to our prescriptions? Is it the act of a friend or a foe to try to point them out to our brethren when asked to address them, and is the speaker to subdue the constitutional habit of his style to a given standard, under penalty of giving offence to a grave assembly?
Homoeopathy and its Kindred Delusions " was published nearly twenty years ago, and has been long out of print, so that the author tried in vain to procure a copy until the kindness of a friend supplied him with the only one he has had for years. A foolish story reached his ears that he was attempting to buy up stray copies for the sake of suppressing it. This edition was in the press at that very time.
Many of the arguments contained in the Lectures have lost whatever novelty they may have possessed. All its predictions have been submitted to the formidable test of time. They appear to have stood it, so far, about as well as most uninspired prophecies; indeed, some of them require much less accommodation than certain grave commentators employ in their readings of the ancient Prophets.
If some statistics recently published are correct, Homoeopathy has made very slow progress in Europe.
In all England, as it appears, there are hardly a fifth more Homoeopathic practitioners than there are students attending Lectures at the Massachusetts Medical College at the present time. In America it has undoubtedly proved more popular and lucrative, yet how loose a hold it has on the public confidence is shown by the fact that, when a specially valued life, which has been played with by one of its agents, is seriously threatened, the first thing we expect to hear is that a regular practitioner is by the patient's bed, and the Homoeopathic counsellor overruled or discarded. Again, how many of the ardent and capricious persons who embraced Homoeopathy have run the whole round of pretentious novelties;--have been boarded at water-cure establishments, closeted with uterine and other specialists, and finally wandered over seas to put themselves in charge of foreign celebrities, who dosed them as lustily as they were ever dosed before they took to globules! It will surprise many to learn to what a shadow of a shade Homoeopathy has dwindled in the hands of many of its noted practitioners. The itch-doctrine is treated with contempt. Infinitesimal doses are replaced by full ones whenever the fancy-practitioner chooses. Good Homoeopathic reasons can be found for employing anything that anybody wants to employ.
Homoeopathy is now merely a name, an unproved theory, and a box of pellets pretending to be specifics, which, as all of us know, fail ignominiously in those cases where we would thankfully sacrifice all our prejudices and give the world to have them true to their promises.
Homoeopathy has not died out so rapidly as Tractoration. Perhaps it was well that it should not, for it has taught us a lesson of the healing faculty of Nature which was needed, and for which many of us have made proper acknowledgments. But it probably does more harm than good to medical science at the present time, by keeping up the delusion of treating everything by specifics,--the old barbarous notion that sick people should feed on poisons [Lachesis, arrow- poison, obtained from a serpent (Pulte). Crotalus horridus, rattlesnake's venom (Neidhard). The less dangerous Pediculus capilis is the favorite remedy of Dr. Mure, the English 'Apostle of Homoeopathy." These are examples of the retrograde current setting towards barbarism] against which a part of the Discourse at the beginning of this volume is directed.
The infinitesimal globules have not become a curiosity as yet, like Perkins's Tractors. But time is a very elastic element in Geology and Prophecy. If Daniel's seventy weeks mean four hundred and ninety years, as the learned Prideaux and others have settled it that they do, the "not many years" of my prediction may be stretched out a generation or two beyond our time, if necessary, when the prophecy will no doubt prove true.
It might be fitting to add a few words with regard to the Essay on the Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever. But the whole question I consider to be now transferred from the domain of medical inquiry to the consideration of Life Insurance agencies and Grand Juries. For the justification of this somewhat sharply accented language I must refer the reader to the paper itself for details which I regret to have been forced to place on permanent record.
BOSTON, January, 1861.