Homœopathic Domestic Physician

By J. H. PULTE, M. D., Author of “Woman’s Medical Guide,” etc. Twenty-fourth thousand. Cincinnati: Moore, Wilstach, Keys, & Co. London: James Epps, 170, Piccadilly, 1857.

OF course the reader understands the following notice to be written by a venerable practitioner, who carries a gold-headed cane, and does not believe in any medical authority later than Sydenham. Listen to him, then, and remember that if anything in the way of answer, or remonstrance, or controversial advertisement is sent to the head-quarters of this periodical, it will go directly into the basket, which entering, a manuscript leaves all hope behind. The “ old salts ” of the “ Atlantic ” do not go for non-committal and neutrality or any of that kind of nonsense. Our oracle with the gold stick must have the ground to himself, or keep his wisdom for another set of readers. A quarrel between “Senex” and “Fairplay” would be amusing, hut expensive. We have no space for it; and the old gentleman, though he can use his cane smartly for one of his age, positively declines the game of single-stick. Hear him.

----The hook mentioned above lies before us with its valves open, helpless as an oyster on its shell, inviting the critical pungent, the professional acid, and the judicial impaling trident. We will be merciful. This fat little literary mollusk is well-conditioned, of fair aspect, and seemingly good of its kind. Twenty-four thousand individuals,-we have its title-page as authority,-more or less lineal descendants of Solomon, have become the fortunate possessors of this plethoric guide to earthly immortality. They might have done worse ; for the work is Well printed, well arranged, and typographically creditable to the great publishing-house which honors Cincinnati by its intelligent enterprise. The purchasers have done very wisely in buying a book which will not hurt their eyes. Mr. Otis Clapp, bibliopolist, has the work, and will be pleased to supply it to an indefinite number of the family above referred to.

----Men live in the immediate neighborhood of a great menagerie, the doors of which are always open. The beasts of prey that come out are called diseases. They feed upon us, and between their teeth we must all pass sooner or later,- all but a few, who are otherwise taken care of. When these animals attack a man, most of them give him a scratch or a bite, and let him go. Some hold on a little while; some are carried about for weeks or months, until the carrier drops down, or they drop off. By and by one is sure to come along that drags down the strongest, and makes an end of him.

Most people know little or nothing of these beasts, until all at once they find themselves attacked by one of them. They are therefore liable to be frightened by those that are not dangerous, and careless with those that are destructive. They do not know what will soothe, and what will exasperate them. They do not even know the dens of many of them, though they are close to their own dwellings.

A physician is one that has lived among these beasts, and studied their aspects and habits. He knows them all well, and looks them in the face, and lays his hand on their backs daily. They seem, as it were, to know him, and to greet him with such risus sardonicus as they can muster, He knows that his friends and himself have all got to be eaten up at last by them, and his friends have the same belief. Yet they want him near them at all times, and with them when they are set upon by any of these their natural enemies. He goes, knowing pretty well what he can do and what he cannot.

He can talk to them in a quiet and sensible way about these terrible beings, concerning which they are so ignorant, and liable to harbor such foolish fancies. He can frighten away some of the lesser kind of animals with certain ill-smelling preparations he carries about him. Once in a while he can draw the teeth of some of the biggest, or throttle them. He can point out their dens, and so keep many from falling into their jaws.

This is a great deal to promise or perform, but it is not all that is expected of him. Sick people are very apt to be both fools and cowards. Many of them confess the fact in the frankest possible way. If you doubt it, ask the next dentist about the wisdom and courage of average manhood under the dispensation of a bad tooth. As a tooth is to a liver, so are the dentists’ patients to the doctors’, in the want of the two excellences above mentioned.

Those not over-wise human beings called patients are frequently a little unreasonable. They come with a small scratch, which Nature will heal very nicely in a few days, and insist on its being closed at once with some kind of joiner’s glue. They want their little coughs cured, so that they may breathe at their ease, when they have no lungs left that are worth mentioning. They would have called in Luke the physician to John the Baptist, when his head was in the charger, and asked for a balsam that would cure cuts. Tins kind of thing cannot be done. But it is very profitable to lie about it, and say that it can be done. The people who make a business of this lying, and profiting by it, are called quacks.

---But as patients wish to believe in all manner of “ cures,” and as all doctors love to believe in the power of their remedies, and as nothing is more open to self-deception than medical experience, the whole matter of therapeutics has always been made a great deal more of than the ease would justify. It has been an inflated currency,-fifty pretences on paper, to one fact of true, ringing metal.

Many of the older books are full of absurd nostrums. A century ago, Huxham gave messes to his patients containing more than four hundred ingredients. Remedies were ordered that must have been suggested by the imagination; things odious, abominable, unmentionable; flesh of vipers, powder of dead men’s bones, and other horrors, best mused in expressive silence. Go to the little book of Robert Boyle,-wise man, philosopher, revered of Addison,- and you will find so many cures for the most formidable diseases, many of them of this fantastic character, that disease should seem to have been a thing that one could turn off at will, like gas or water in our houses. Only there were rather too many specifics in those days. For if one has “ an excellent approved remedy ” that never fails, it seems unnecessary to print a list of twenty others for the same purpose. This is wanton excess ; it is gilding the golden pill, and throwing fresh perfume on the Mistura Assafœtidæ.

As the observation of nature has extended, and as mankind have approached the state of only semi-barbarism in which they now exist, there has been an improvement. The materia medica has been weeded ; much that was worthless and revolting has been thrown overboard; simplicity has been introduced into prescriptions ; and the whole business of drugging the sick has undergone a most salutary reform. The great fact has been practically recognized, that the movements of life in disease obey laws which, under the circumstances, are on the whole salutary, and only require a limited and occasional interference by any special disturbing agents. The list of specifics has been reduced to a very brief catalogue, and the delusion which had exaggerated the power of drugging for so many generations has been tempered down by sound and systematic observation.

Homœopathy came, and with one harlequin bound leaped out of its century backwards into the region of quagmires and fogs and mirages, from which true medical science was painfully emerging. All the trumpery of exploded pharmacopœias was revived under new names. Even the domain of the loathsome has been recently invaded, and simpletons are told in the book before us to swallow serpents’ poison ; nay, it is said that the pediculus capitis is actually prescribed in infusion,-hunted down in his capillary forest, and transferred to the digestive organs of those he once fed upon.

It falsely alleged one axiom as the basis of existing medical practice, namely, Contraria contrariis curantur,-“ Contraries are cured by contraries.” No such principle was ever acted upon, exclusively, as the basis of medical practice. The man who does not admit it as one of the principles of practice would, on medical principles, refuse a drop of cold water to cool the tongue of Dives in fiery torments. The only unconditional principle ever recognized, by medical science has been, that diseases are to be treated by the remedies that experience shows to be useful. The universal use of both cold and hot external and internal remedies in various inflammatory states puts the garrote at once on the babbling throat of the senseless assertion of the homœopathists, and stultifies for all time tin nickname “allopathy.”

It falsely alleged a second axiom, Similia simitibus curantur,-“Like is cured by like,”-as the basis of its own practice ; for it does not keep to any such rule, as every page of the book before us abundantly shows.

It subjected credulous mankind to the last of indignities, in forcing it to listen to that doctrine of infinitesimals and potencies which is at once the most epigrammatic of paradoxes, and the crowning exploit of pseudo-scientific audacity.

It proceeded to prove itself true by juggling statistics ; some of the most famous of winch, we may remark, are very well shown up by Professor Worthington Hooker, in a recent essay. And having done all these thing's, it sat down in the shadow of a brazen bust of its founder, and invited mankind to join in the Barmecide feast it bad spread on the coffin of Science; who, however, proved not to have been buried in it,-indeed, not to have been buried at all.

Of course, it had, and has, a certain success. Its infinitesimal treatment being a nullity, patients are never hurt by drugs, when it is adhered to. It pleases the imagination. It is image-worship, relicwearing, holy-water-sprinkling, transferred from the spiritual world to that of the body. Poets accept it; sensitive and spiritual women become sisters of charity in its service. It does not offend the palate, and so spares the nursery those scenes of single combat in which infants were wont to yield at length to the pressure of the spoon and the imminence of asphyxia. It gives the ignorant, who have such an inveterate itch for dabbling in physic, a book and a doll’s medicine-chest, and lets them play doctors and doctresses without fear of having to call in the coroner. And just so long as unskilful and untaught people cannot tell coincidences from cause and effect in medical practice,-which to do, the wise and experienced know how difficult!-so long it will have plenty of “ facts ” to fall back upon. Who can blame a man for being satisfied with the argument, “I was ill, and am well,-great is Hahnemann ! ” ? Only this argument serves all impostors and impositions. It is not of much value, but it is irresistible, and therefore quackery is immortal.

Homœopathy is one of its many phases ; the most imaginative, the most elegant, and, it is fair to say, the least noxious in its direct agencies. “ It is melancholy,”- we use the recent words of the world-honored physician of the Queen’s household, Sir John Forbes,-“to be forced to make admissions in favor of a system so utterly false and despicable as Homœopathy.” Yet we must own that it may have been indirectly useful, as the older farce of the weapon-ointment certainly was, in teaching medical practitioners to place more reliance upon nature. Most scientific men see through its deceptions at a glance. It may be practised by shrewd men and by honest ones ; rarely, it must be feared, by those who are both shrewd and honest. As a psychological experiment on the weakness of cultivated minds, it is the best trick of the century.

---Here the old gentleman took his cane and walked out to cool himself.

FOREIGN.

IT is an old remark of Lessing, often repeated, but nevertheless true, that Frenchmen, as a general rule, are sadly deficient in the mental powers suited to objective observation, and therefore eminently disqualified for reliable reports of travels. Among the host of French writing travellers or travelling writers, on whatever foreign countries, there have always been very few who looked at foreign countries, nations, institutions, and achievements, with anything like fairness of judgment and capacity of understanding. For an average Frenchman, Moliere’s renowned juxtaposition of

is a gospel down to this day; and no country can so justly complain of being constantly misunderstood and misrepresented by French tourists as ours. The more difficult it is for a Frenchman not to glance through colored spectacles from the Palais Royal at whatever does not belong to “ the Great Nation," the more praise those few of them deserve who give to the world correct and impartial impressions of travel and reliable ethnological works.

Such is the case with two works which we are glad to recommend to our readers. The first is