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.
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