reverently with bated breath and whispering humbleness until these great men shall graciously condescend to vouchsafe their attention spontaneously? Quousque tandem - How much longer is our patience to be abused? With all deference to their better judgment, we beg to say, that we claim a right to protect our own interests, if our natural guardians neglect them. Yes, and moreover we will exercise that right, let who will forbid it. If blame does rest somewhere, it is surely not on those who have so long and so anxiously awaited the decision of men of science on a subject of such vital importance, and awaited it in silence. But, after all, this objection is moonshine of the purest water. If the present writer had stepped forth to assert or to teach-to pull down or to set up-to judge and to decide, the objection might have had some force. But it is not sa. He asks, and asks respectfully, of those who alone have power to answer the question, whether Homœopathy be what he learns in foreign journals that it is, and he gets abundant abuse by way of reply. He asks for bread and gets a stone, not given him, but thrown at his head. Now abuse is a species of argument which always implies a consciousness of weakness in him who uses it; and he is of course more convinced than ever of the truth of Homœopathy, and more desirous than ever that the question should be settled. therefore, he appears before the public, beseeching them to enforce and obtain inquiry. Homœopathy is either false or true. If false, let them not suffer it to spread; if true, let them not allow it to be swamped. Nothing but experiment can decide. If the members of the medical Profession have made those experiments, we have a right to call for them; if they have not, the more burning shame for them all, from the leader of the Profession to the lowest pupil in the hospital The best recompense they can offer us for such neglect, is to institute them at once. We ask for no opinions-we want facts. We will not be satisfied with hearing Hahnemann and Once more, his supporters called silly names, for we are able to do that ourselves if need were. Experiment we want-we want the system tried. Alas! to criticise my style in the most florid oratory of Billingsgate is somewhat easier than to establish the falsehood of Homœopathy; possibly, also, somewhat more grateful than to establish its truth. The means of defence with which nature has provided animals are various. While some will meet an adversary boldly and fight him fairly, others decline the conflict altogether. But the Cuttle-fish, it is said, is furnished with a very ingenious contrivance of another sort: when pursued so closely that he has no other means of escape left, he discharges against the aggressor a cloud of black mud, under cover of which he eludes observation, while his disgusted adversary retires from a pursuit in which nothing is certain but that he would soil his fingers. I will vouch neither for the truth of the story, nor for the correctness of its application. But one thing I will vouch for - that, undeterred by anger or abuse, I will persevere in the endeavour to call the attention of the public to Homœopathy, until some one shall condescend to treat us with something better than mere invective. Personalities I leave with pleasure to those who do not think themselves degraded by using them. The object I have in view does not render it necessary to scold like an angry schoolboy, whose plum cake is in jeopardy; still less does it exact such a painful sacrifice as to compromise my own dignity by insulting a gentleman or calumniating an opponent. It seems probable that this object would be more readily attained by showing that Homoeopathy is not so totally absurd a thing as has been asserted; and that, whether true or false, it has in fact a show of reasoning about it which has never been fairly stated in this country. The system is strangethe name of it is new-the practice of it is unlike any thing we have been accustomed to: and the culpable silence of medical men respecting it, has hitherto kept in the dark all who are not in the habit of seeing foreign journals. When, at length, after a lapse of time which ought to conjure a blush in cheeks unused to such a phenomenon, after an incessant struggle-after having won its way, foot by foot, and inch by inch, against all opposition, it has taken its station as a science; then, at last, a few pages in a periodical are perhaps dedicated to it. But even then we are not told of the progress it has made, or of the ground it occupies—we are not told of the facts on which it rests, or of the arguments by which it is supported. No one speaks of the almost miraculous cures it has wrought—no one mentions the hostility it has met with, and the converts it has made; or, that for a quarter of a century it has withstood the most violent efforts to extinguish it. Travestied off in the broadest caricature, it is announced as a sort of excellent joke a thing perhaps of yesterday — an amusing instance of German credulity, and — English acuteness we are to suppose by implication. And thus, when at last it is known, seen only through the distorting medium of some Medical Review, it is regarded as something just dropped from the moon-a monstrous incarnation of mysticism-a strange title for a system, hit upon last week by a strange doctor, with a strange name, which has had the luck to obtain half a dozen crazed advocates and cure as many Hypochondriacs as did the rival system of Prince Hohenlohe. It is to endeavour to set the subject before the British people in somewhat of its proper light; to give them some notion, however faint, of the principles of this science, and of the chain of reasoning on which those principles depend; to prove to them that if not true, it is at least not unlike truth: to convince them that if there be anything strange about it, it is strange to those only who have been little accustomed to see light thrown on the art of healing; that if there be novelty in it, it consists in the application of common sense to medical practice; it is for these purposes that these remarks are written. It will not, however, I trust, be supposed that the truth of Homœopathy depends on any theoretical reasoning, still less in any the very minutest fraction of a degree on such feeble advocacy as any non-medical man can give to it. It has advanced steadily for one simple reason only, that it performed cures which nothing else could perform; and if it do not effect the same end here, all words will be as useless as they would be if it were attempted to reason the stars out of their courses Nevertheless to make known some of the arguments in its favour may tend to familiarize the mind with it, and thus smooth the road for its progress, if it be destined to progress. To apologize to the reader for the errors which have inevitably crept into the following pages is a duty which seems almost superfluous. Would that I could hope that with those errors enough truth is blended to awaken curiosity, and excite a thirst for draughts from the spring. In the Organon, in the Materia Medica Pura, and especially in the Chronic Diseases, and in the other writings of Hahnemann, the reader will find the pure fountain head of Homœopathy, unmuddied by the awkward attempts of us blunderers to guide little rills of it to plains which have been hitherto barren May he "drink there and live; "—he will then pardon the errors of the work which first taught him the way to it. Whatever be the result, if the march of truth be in the slightest degree accelerated, my only aim is answered. To destroy the system of two thousand years, and build up in its room another and a better; to rise superior to follies and prejudices and faults, however specious, however venerable, however hallowed by the general acceptance of mankind; to shake off the heaped error of centuries as the awakening lion shakes off from his flanks the forest-leaves which have fallen on hin in the night: this is the work of One on whom we cannot look without remembering how many years have passed away since there was a Giant on the earth. To us, the ordinary and diminutive race, it may be permitted to scan and measure the trace of the mighty step beneath which so many old opinions are crumbling into nothing. Tut, man, one fire burns out another's burning; And the rank poison of the old will die. Romeo and Juliet. Before the curing of a strong disease, King John. |