It is extraordinary to observe that the system which,
by its reducing medicine to a name and a farce, has accustomed all who
have sense enough to see through its thin artifices to the idea that
diseases get well without being "cured," should now be the main support
of the tottering poison-cure doctrine. It has unquestionably helped to
teach wise people that nature heals most diseases without help from
pharmaceutic art, but it continues to persuade fools that art can arrest
them all with its specifics.
It is worse than useless to attempt in any way to check the freest
expression of opinion as to the efficacy of any or all of the "heroic"
means of treatment employed by practitioners of different schools and
periods. Medical experience is a great thing, but we must not forget
that there is a higher experience, which tries its results in a court of
a still larger jurisdiction; that, namely, in which the laws of human
belief are summoned to the witness-box, and obliged to testify to the
sources of error which beset the medical practitioner. The verdict is as
old as the father of medicine, who announces it in the words, "judgment
is difficult." Physicians differed so in his time, that some denied that
there was any such thing as an art of medicine.
One man's best remedies were held as mischievous by another. The art of
healing was like soothsaying, so the common people said; "the same bird
was lucky or unlucky, according as he flew to the right or left.
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