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is a combination of small doses for an old-school prescription. The delicately humorous side of Dr. Aulde's position is found in the plea made by him for these small doses: "A difficulty which at present confronts the progressive physician lies in the administration of large doses. Against this patients rebel, and convalescence is proverbially slow.

Since we are unable, unfortunately, to recognize many diseases in the formative period, it is not saying too much that great harm may follow the indiscriminate employment of large doses of medicine." Which, oddly enough, is what Samuel Hahnemann said a hundred years ago.

Since diseases depend upon "the derangement of cell-function,

This naturally leads us to study the effect of medication upon the diseased cell, which, being interpreted, means clinical observation. So the expressive term "cellular therapy" is "hesitatingly" applied to this new method (sic) of studying the virtues of therapeutic agents. Therefore, "If this doctrine be true,

then it follows that small doses

are to be preferred-in fact they are a necessity."

Delightful and irrefutable logic! The cell being a small thing, small doses only must be used to restore the wayward and erring entity to the path of rectitude and sobriety. Truly Shakespeare should have applied to Dr. Aulde, and his confrères of the old school, who will doubtless hail his book with the reverence due new discoveries, to find out "what's in a name"! Small doses recommended by homoeopathy? Charlatanism — rank, irrational charlatanism! Small doses given in the experimental interests of "cellular therapy"? Wonderful discovery! Let us sieze this Providential occasion to secure a quiet little "scoop" and steal of methods whose efficacy we have long enviously seen, and whose origin the dignity of "regular physicians a thing quite apart, apparently, from the obligations of every-day honesty — forbids us to admit and pay tribute to!

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THE PURITY OF ARBITRARY DECISIONS is admirably set forth in a paragraph or two in a recent "Doctor's Talk," faithfully and graphically reported by "Selah " for our very much esteemed contemporary, the Era. With the keen, incisive, good sense, and

the picturesque phraseology for which these "Talks famous, the "Doctor" thus discoursed of the manner and customs of the would-be "Moderator," at some meeting where there is animated discussion of a living and many-sided question:

"Then it is that our champion steps in. He rises slowly, addresses the chair, and then attempts to pour oil on the troubled waters. His opening words are, generally, somewhat like this:

"Extreme views have been expressed on both sides. Now, the fact is, both are wrong and both are right, and the truth lies half-way between.'

"This sounds very pretty. It has an air of plausibility. The groundlings applaud, and wonder why nobody else thought of that.

"From his text, our orator gravely expounds the matter. He very ingeniously tries to reconcile opposing statements, and to make everybody contented by patting each one on the back, and when he stops speaking and resumes his seat a general feeling of comfort pervades the meeting, but the people know just about as much as they did before.

"Now, this is all very pretty, and would go well in a prize poem at a girl's school, but in a meeting of men, discussing subjects scientific, it is about as much a settlement of a question as it would be to settle the custody of a child between two rival claimants by cutting the child in two."

"But how else would you settle a question, when the two sets of partisans show no signs of coming to an agreement?'

"Leave it unsettled! Great Scott! The world is full of unsettled questions. If you think you are right, stick to your point, and wait. If you are right, you'll soon have the majority on your side. If you are wrong, it doesn't make you any nearer right to admit that the truth lies half-way between,' for more than half

the time it does not it lies away over on the other side of the barbed-wire fence. If one party is right and the other party wrong, a compromise will settle nothing—it will only make both parties wrong.

"Hence, I say that this sort of a settlement settles nothing."

That is a motto which, in all its trenchant Americanism of

phrase, should be painted on the walls of every deliberative assembly whose deliberations are on large, scientific matters. "Great Scott! Leave it unsettled! The world is full of unsettled questions!" Too few members of such assemblies seem to realize that they are met for investigation, for argument, to throw light, to accumulate data; not in any possible sense to make decisions and issue pronunciamentos. It is altogether and ridiculously childish to suppose that a majority vote on a scientific question is of the slightest imaginable value. It were as sensible to vote on the probable state of the weather a year from date, and imagine the vote has settled its prospective fairness or foulness. Great questions move in great orbits; they are governed by the mighty laws of ascertained fact, not by the whiffling laws of changing human opinion. What the immutable laws of fact are we shall learn the sooner when we realize that scientific assemblies are to investigate and search out laws; not to make them. We commend this truth, and its vivid embodiment in the Era's epigram to the pilgrims journeying to the forthcoming Institute session.

TELLING STATISTICS — and the story they tell is worth yards of theoretical argument to homoeopathists fighting the good fight for homoeopathic recognition in state and national institutions! are those which we herewith append. They tell, at a glance, the relative work done in five Massachusetts asylums for the insane. It is to be noted, as suggestive, that the cases "recovered" in the Westborough hospital do not include the cases of habitual drunkards, though such are included in the "recovered" of the asylum at Worcester. The showing for the hospital under homoeopathic control is a fine one, of which homoeopathists everywhere cannot but be justly proud :

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The moment of leaving the hospital is the uniform time in all hospitals for estimating the mental condition of patients.

The last column refers only to habitual drunkards. They have been included in the totals of each hospital, but are there entered separately to assist any one in finding the number of the insane by subtracting the number of habitual drunkards from the total; for example, Worcester, total recovered 129, subtract 42 habitual drunkards leaves 87 insane discharged recovered.

COMMUNICATIONS.

-:0:

A SUNDAY LECTURE.

BY WM. TOD HELMUTH, M. D.

[Delivered February 14th, 1892, (St. Valentine's Day), before the New York Homeopathic Medical College.]

It is not often that services are observed on Sundays or on Saints' days in a medical college. It is not often that St. Valentine, who died in Rome, A. D. 270, is worshipped at all, other than by the traditional interchange of verses, mostly breathing of love, sometimes of fun, sometimes even of ridicule.

The facts about St. Valentine's day are these: In Rome, about the middle of February, great feasts were celebrated in honor of Pan and Juno. One of the chief ceremonies of the day consisted in placing the written names of young women in a box, from which the men were directed to draw, each man thus securing his mate. The priests of the early church, endeavoring to establish Christianity by some commutation pagan ims, substituted the names of saints for the names of women, and the drawing was made to take place on the 14th of February, or St. Valentine's day. This, however, viz., the substitution of saints for the girls, would in no way satisfy the men; and why should it? It was found impossible to entirely obliterate a ceremony to which the people had become familiar through ancestral tradition; and though the outline of the ceremony was preserved and St. Valentine held in high regard, yet letters and scraps of paper passed between the sexes, breathing all sorts of love, or, as I have already said, sometimes ridicule, and sometimes even malice. It is recorded also, as a rural tradition, that as each bird chooses it mate on St. Valentine's day so the young man looked forward to select his lady love on the 14th of February. So much for St. Valentine's day; and as very soon I shall expect to have your names all before me, and be one of a number to draw out the papers on which your future may depend, I shall elect to be your Valentine to-day, not a foolish or sentimental, but a good valentine, and lilt out to you some things which I fancy a doctor ought to know, and which never can be spoken of in the regular curriculum; first, because the subjects are out of place in a regular course of instruction on a specific subject; and second, because there is no time.

Let me, therefore, begin by saying, that in face of the astounding pace at which the sciences are moving, be careful not to be carried about, as St. Paul says, "with every wind of doctrine."

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