been doing it ever since the world began. Admitting this, where can you find any substance that has not heen medicated and potentized again and again? Take for example any drug you please say, gold. It has been found in the sea. All the waters of all the oceans have been potentized with it for untold ages. We do not know their exact potency, but it would not be called high; for according to the best of authority there is not water enough in existence to attenuate a single grain up to the 15th c. And if all water has been thus endowed with the medical properties of gold, how are we going to deprive it of those properties? Shall we say by heating? by distillation? That is pure assumption. There is not a particle of evidence that it will do it. Does heat change the nature of gold? We all know it does not. It goes through the fire again and again only to come out more pure. Does heat change the properties of water? We have no such evidence. What possible reason then have we for thinking that distillation can in any way change the nature of this enormous quantity of gold-water? Can it be done by evaporation and re-condensation as in the cloud and rain? That would seem even less probable, for it lacks the element of heat. No. If water succussed with gold becomes potentized with it, then all the water in the world for aught I can see is some potency of gold, and must forever remain so unless an agent can be applied which has power to change the properties of gold itself. And what is there that doesn't contain water? Rectified spirit contains 15%; proof spirit, about 50%; it is one of the constituents of saccharum lactis. If our postulate be correct, there is nothing that has not been potentized with gold, and not only with gold (that was taken simply for illustration) but arsenic, copper, sodium, phosphorus, mercury, and all the rest of the three-score and more of primal ele

ments.

Of course this theory precludes the possibility of ever cleansing any bottle, glass, or other utensil which has once contained. medicine. For, if matter by contact endows other matter with its medical properties, the inner surface of every such receptacle must have become a potentized, and thus a potentizing, surface. Any amount of washing, therefore, even with pure water, (if, indeed, there were such a thing) would have no effect, for unlike anything else in nature these unfed batteries of dynamization are exhaustless!

Some of our pharmacists have recognized this difficulty and tried to devise ways of obviating it. "Necessity," you know, "is the mother of invention." It would not do to furnish a separate vial, or mortar and pestle, for each degree of potency of every drug. No storehouse could contain them. Theory

or no theory, measures, mortars, etc. must be cleaned. Ordinary washing and rinsing are out of the question, for that is the way we potentize. The British Homœopathic Pharmacopaia solves the problem in this most artful manner. After alluding to the importance of cleansing such utensils, it says: "This may be effectually accomplished by washing the bottle in an ascending stream of water' in place of a descending stream as is almost universally employed." It then goes on to give the details of the process. Think of it, gentlemen, you can throw a stream of water down into a potentized bottle forever and it all becomes medicine, but invert the bottle, and throw the water into it, and presto! the charm is broken, the bottle has lost its power to potentize! Wonderful law of nature to be thus annulled by the turning of your hand!

According to Prof. Conrad Wesselhoeft, who has probably given this subject more careful and intelligent study than any one else, all trace of material medicine has disappeared before we reach the 12th c. dilution. That being so, all of the 12th must have disappeared before having reached the 24th, and the 24th would be lost before the 36th; and so on, a complete renewal being brought about by each multiple of twelve. Suppose now we prescribe sulphur 200th. We are giving a drop of alcohol potentized by contact with another drop of alcohol, which in turn was potentized by another drop of alcohol, and so on through fifteen series of complete change, before we reach the 12th dilution, which itself you remember was nothing but alcohol, which might or might not have been in contact with the trace of sulphur in the third trituration, which is supposed to have been dissolved! And still we call that a dilution of sulphur. Tell me, pray, why that is any more sulphur than the water we draw from our faucets. We say it was a solution of sulphur potentized through two hundred stages of succussion. Why not with equal reason say that the water from the spring is a solution of sulphur potentized, by the elemental forces. within the earth and without the seething springs, the grinding glaciers, the attrition of wind and wave- through more than two hundred million such stages, since our world first rolled forth from the dark. And yet we, like Jenichen, think to increase that potency by a few additional strokes of our "strong right arm"!

I cannot close without anticipating the one great argument which I know will be made in favor of the potencies, namely, that the proof of their efficacy rests not on theory, or syllogism, but upon abundant clinical evidence.

I admit the plausibility of this statement. Facts are stubborn things, and even one may be sufficient to invalidate a thousand

theories. But are we quite sure that clinical evidence always fairly represents the facts? Is it alone enough to determine the therapeutic value of every measure? Clinical evidence at best. knows only three things: A disease, a prescription, and a recovery or death. It can not say surely that the prescription caused that recovery or death. It may have done so, it may have had nothing to do with either; or either may have occurred in spite of it. And here it is that common sense, if we have any, must save us. You have a case of pneumonia of a week's standing; you prescribe phos. In twelve hours the temperature falls five or six degrees and reaches the norm. you give phos. the credit for the change? Not at all. It is just the crisis you had anticipated-just what undoubtedly would have occurred had no medicine whatever been given. So in the treatment of measles, scarlet fever, and the whole train of self-limiting diseases, it is doubtful to many of our best observers whether medication affects in the least their general course.

Do

During the winter of 1883-84, I enjoyed the clinical advantages of the Vienna Hospital, which, so far as I know, is the largest in the world, and I am witness to the fact that very little medicine was there given. None whatever in simple, acute diseases, and yet most of those very cases made excellent recoveries. How do you account for it?

Is clinical evidence always reliable? What has it ever proved? What indeed has it not proved? Clinical evidence in the primitive ages stamped with therapeutic value the most vile and loathsome things, and even now, among the American Indians it has set its seal of approval upon the mysterious leathern bag, the rattle, and the tom-tom. Clinical evidence up to the time of Hahnemann, had shown to even the brightest minds in the world the necessity of using in nearly every case, lancet, emetic, and drastic pill. Clinical evidencewhat has it not sustained? Tons and tons of it, extolling quack doctors and patented nostrums are published every year. Do you accept it?

In view of these facts as honest, earnest, scientific men, are we not bound to investigate before admitting the infallibility of such proof? Are there not other sources of power which may explain some results?

Twenty years ago under the influence of such as Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer, the world seemed rushing into materialism. Men tried to trace out the beginnings of life from inanimate mould up through mollusk, and monkey, unto man, but they failed; and even the wisest have had to acknowledge that there are more things in heaven and earth than were ever dreamed of in their philosophies. There are forces about us, and within

us, which no mete can measure, and no scales weigh; which baffle the biologist and elude the spectroscope; whose laws of action none have been able to formulate, although none escape their power. That these forces may both disturb and restore health there is abundant proof. But to think of grinding them into sugar of milk, or of shaking them in a bottle of water is preposterous; for they are not emanations of dead substance, but of living souls, and are akin in nature to Omnipotence.

I am not a Spiritualist, Mesmerist, Christian Scientist, or Faith-Healer, though doubtless there is truth in each. Witness the hundreds in our own State who have been helped to regain a physical equipoise by the prayers of faith at the Consumptives' Home, at Old Orchard, and other places. Witness the more than twenty thousand intelligent people in the United States who are ready to testify to the superior efficacy of mental healing. Witness the myriads who during the past thirty-four years have thronged "the favored grotto of Lourdes," or languishing in their homes, even thousands of miles away, have responded to the touch of its mystical waters. Witness the slow but certain results reported by the English and American Societies of Psychical Research. Witness the miracles of mesmerism, which point to possibilities beyond our present powers of conception. Facts are stranger than fiction, and the world is finding it out. Let us as physicians be not the last to recognize this almost irresistible influence of mind, and assign to it its rightful place in the healing art. In the midst of such marvellous exhibitions of unseen power is it rational to ascribe to a pinch of sugar or a drop of water the recoveries which we observe? Do we not know that to him who believes, the amulet may become an armor, and the placebo an elixir of life!

COLCHICUM: ITS PATHOGENESY AS RELATED TO CHOLERA. BY J. P. SUTHERLAND, M.D., BOSTON.

[Read before the Massachusetts Homœopathic Medical Society.]

Cholera has made us a call. It threatened to be a visit; but thanks to the wholesome inhospitality with which this most unwelcome visitor was received, it scarcely set foot on our shores before it was banished from them. There is more than a possibility, however, that the visit may come after all, should the disease appear next year, early in the hot season, propagated from the germs which are so likely to survive, undetected. from the mildest epidemic, and spring suddenly into most perilous life. In view of this possibility, it seems to me worth while to glance at the armamentarium from which the homœopathic

student of materia medica can choose his weapons to combat the disease.

The drugs recommended by Hahnemann of course hold first, oldest, most authoritative place in this connection. Camphor, cuprum, veratrum album and in certain cases of a typhoidal character with delirium, bryonia and rhus in alternation,- this brief list almost exhausts the remedies whose usefulness in cholera is traditional among homoeopathists.

Of these CAMPHOR is best known and most depended upon. Its usefulness, which I believe to be great and undeniable, I do not here propose to dwell upon. But I desire briefly to call your attention to a fact ignored or overlooked even by many of our most authoritative teachers and writers; namely, that camphor is very imperfectly homoeopathic to the symptoms of cholera, and that Hahnemann never claimed it to be homoopathic at all. He recommended it as an all but infallible germicide. The sole claim of camphor to homœopathicity in cholera is in the stage of collapse; to administer it earlier is to administer it empirically; none the less beneficially for that, I would add,— but still empirically, and we simplify matters by recognizing that fact.

Dr. Hughes, in his "Manual of Therapeutics," says that camphor is "perfectly homoeopathic to cholera in the stage of invasion," but that "it is not, indeed, directly homoeopathic to the cramps, diarrhoea, or vomiting."

Careful reading of the records of camphor in the "Cyclopædia of Drug Pathogenesy," and of the cases reported in Taylor's "Treatise on Poisons," will show that in the majority of the cases referred to, coldness, collapse and convulsions occurred, and two fatal cases, both infants, are recorded; but the picture presented bears only slight (if any) resemblance to cholera.

Hahnemann says "camphor cannot preserve those in health from cholera," i. e., it is not prophylatic; and he does not claim to have introduced camphor into the treatment of cholera, for it was used as the chief ingredient of a famous recipe before his recommendation in 1831. These points are well shown in the "Lesser Writings."

CUPRUM. This is one of the Hahnemannian remedies, after camphor, or in the second stage, and Hahnemann's prophylatic for cholera.

The best way to determine whether or not it is a simillimum. to cholera, is to read the thirty-one records of poisoning by copper reported in the "Cyclopædia of Drug Pathogenesy," which, by the way, contains no provings of copper. It is to be noticed that purging is far from a constant effect of poisoning by cuprum, constipation being about as frequently noted.