They know what they are doing.
They are appealing to the detestable old superstitious presumption in
favor of whatever is nauseous and noxious as being good for the sick.
Again, we all occasionally meet persons stained with nitrate of silver,
given for epilepsy. Read what Dr. Martin says, about the way in which it
came to be used, in his excellent address before the Norfolk County
Medical Society, and the evidence I can show, but have not time for now,
and then say what you think of the practice which on such presumptions
turns a white man as blue as the double-tattooed King of the Cannibal
Islands! [Note A.]
If medical superstitions have fought their way down through all the
rationalism and scepticism of the nineteenth century, of course the
theories of the schools, supported by great names, adopted into the
popular belief and incorporated with the general mass of misapprehension
with reference to disease, must be expected to meet us at every turn in
the shape of bad practice founded on false doctrine. A French patient
complains that his blood heats him, and expects his doctor to bleed him.
An English or American one says he is bilious, and will not be easy
without a dose of calomel. A doctor looks at a patient's tongue, sees it
coated, and says the stomach is foul; his head full of the old saburral
notion which the extreme inflammation-doctrine of Broussais did so much
to root out, but which still leads, probably, to much needless and
injurious wrong of the stomach and bowels by evacuants, when all they
want is to be let alone.
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