Part 2

Old Physic has for several centuries past drifted in the wrong direction, striking occasionally upon a rock, but finds itself to day further off from shore than ever before.

Medicine, the oldest and most important of all branches of science, has not kept up with developments in other departments, but the rays of light have already deeply penetrated into the darkness of the past, fast undermining the building of the so-called "Rational Medicine" with all its hypothesis and traditions.

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It was near the end of the last century, that the idea occurred to a single man, that the reason he had failed in practice must be that the medical profession was entirely on the wrong path. He made the effort to cure diseases on the principle directly opposite to those on which he had been educated to act, and he was successful. He thought a reformation of medicine needful and desirable, and proper to be attempted. He set about it, hoping, if he should succeed in pointing out a more safe, certain and pleasant road to the life-giving and life-renewing fountain of health, that it would be a blessing to suffering humanity. That man was

SAMUEL HAHNEMANN.

Had the reform inaugurated by him been of an insignificant character, it might have been accepted by the medical world without controversy. Had the new path into which he invited the profession been only a little smoother than the old one and lying right alongside of it, like that which led the pilgrims from the main high-way into the domains of the giant, physicians might have been easily lured into it. But the revolution was a radical one. It contemplated a counter-march such as the teachers and practitoners of the healing art had never been called upon to make. It called upon the chiefs of the profession to reverse the wheels of the ponderous engine, and seek for the long-sought shore in the opposite direction.

The new doctrine came forth embodied in only three simple words: "Similia Similibus Curantur."

Thus the year 1790 gave birth to the celebrated system of Hahnemann, which has received from him a Greek title, expressive of its peculiarities--Homopathy, and in opposition to "Contraria Contraries Curantur."--Allopathy.

It is not my purpose to entertain you with a detailed history of medicine, nor even to notice the successive and conflicting theories that have arisen from time to time; but simply to show that the old, or Allopathic system of medicine as practiced till this day is unworthy of our confidence; that its theory of therapeutics is irrational and worthless; that there is an absence of any reliable principle to guide the physicians in the treatment of diseases; and that the sick are far better off when left to nature, than when subject to the pernicious system of dosing, while a growing want of confidence in this system, both in the public mind and the medical profession, loudly calls for something more rational in its theory and more successful in its practice.

I shall not ask you to accept my individual opinions in support of these views, but shall place upon the witness-stand, and give you the declarations of men who have spent their lives in the practice of this system--most of them authors and teachers, men living in different countries, and from the highest ranks of the profession, and who, if any, should be able to pronounce a eulogy upon this system of practice.

I introduce to you first BOERHAVE, a man justly illustrious in the history of medicine, he lived a century before HAHNEMANN, and was for over forty years Professor at the University at Leiden.

Hear him! He says:

"If we compare the good which a half dozen true disciples of Æsculapius have done since their art began, with the evil which the immense number of doctors have inflicted upon mankind, we must be satisfied that it would have been infinitely better for mankind if medical men had never existed."

The celebrated BICHAT of Paris, thus speaks of the therapeutic system of his day:

"It is an incoherent assemblage of incoherent opinions; it is perhaps, of all the physiological sciences that which best shows the caprice of the human mind. What do I say?--It is not a science for a methodical mind; it is a shapeless assemblage of inexact ideas, of observations often peurile, of deceptive remedies and of formula as fastidiously and fantastically conceived, as they are tediously arranged."

Then we find the equally celebrated French physician, MAJENDIE, saying:

"I hesitate not to declare, no matter how sorely I shall wound our vanity, that so gross is our ignorance of the physiological disorders called diseases, that it would perhaps be better to do nothing, and resign the complaint we are called upon to treat to the resources of Nature, than to act as we frequently do, without knowing the why and the wherefore of our conduct, and at the obvious risk of hastening the end of our patient."

DR. GOOD, the great nosologist, asserts that

"The science of medicine is a barbarous jargon, and the effects of our medicines on the human system are in the highest degree uncertain; except, indeed, that they have already destroyed more lives than war, pestilence and famine combined."

SIR ASTLEY COOPER, England's greatest surgeon says:

"The science of medicine is founded on conjecture and improved by murder."

But, it may be said, these men lived in the past, and since their time the science of medicine has improved and its practice has become more rational and safe.

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Let us then come down to a later period, and listen to DR. CHRISTISON, the present eminent Professor of Materia Medica at the University of Edinburgh. He says:

"Of all medical sciences, therapeutics is the most unsatisfactory in its present state, and the least advanced in progress, and surrounded by the most deceitful sources of fallacy."

SIR JOHN FORBES, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians: Physician to the Queen's Household, late editor of the "British and Foreign Medical Review," after a frank admission of the imperfections of Allopathic medicine, says:

"FIRST. That in a large proportion of the cases treated by Allopathic physicians, the disease is cured by Nature and not by them."

"SECOND. That in a lesser, but still not a small proportion, the disease is cured in spite of them; in other words, their interference opposing instead of assisting the cure."