Medical Essays, 1842-1882
by Oliver Wendell Holmes · English · Gutenberg #2700 · 784,300 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Medical Essays, 1842-1882
Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Most recently updated: January 1, 2021
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEDICAL ESSAYS, 1842-1882 ***
Produced by David Widger
MEDICAL ESSAYS
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
1842-1882
CONTENTS
PREFACE.
A SECOND PREFACE.
PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.
HOMOEOPATHY AND ITS KINDRED DELUSIONS
THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF PUERPERAL FEVER
CURRENTS AND COUNTER-CURRENTS IN MEDICAL SCIENCE
BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE IN SOME PROVINCES OF MEDICAL SCIENCE.
SCHOLASTIC AND BEDSIDE TEACHING.
THE MEDICAL PROFESSION IN MASSACHUSETTS.
THE YOUNG PRACTITIONER
MEDICAL LIBRARIES.
SOME OF MY EARLY TEACHERS
APPENDUM
NOTES TO THE ADDRESS ON CURRENTS AND COUNTER CURRENTS IN MEDICAL SCIENCE.
PREFACE.
The character of the opposition which some of these papers have met with
suggests the inference that they contain really important, but unwelcome
truths. Negatives multiplied into each other change their sign and
become positives. Hostile criticisms meeting together are often
equivalent to praise, and the square of fault-finding turns out to be
the same thing as eulogy.
But a writer has rarely so many enemies as it pleases him to believe.
Self-love leads us to overrate the numbers of our negative constituency.
The larger portion of my limited circle of readers must be quite
indifferent to, if not ignorant of, the adverse opinions which have been
expressed or recorded concerning any of these Addresses or Essays now
submitted to their own judgment. It is proper, however, to inform
them, that some of the positions maintained in these pages have been
unsparingly attacked, with various degrees of ability, scholarship,
and good-breeding. The tone of criticism naturally changes with local
conditions in different parts of a country extended like our own, so
that it is one of the most convenient gauges of the partial movements in
the direction of civilization. It is satisfactory to add, that the views
assailed have also been unflinchingly defended by unsought champions,
among the ablest of whom it is pleasant to mention, at this moment of
political alienation, the Editor of the Charleston Medical Journal.
“Currents and Counter-Currents” was written and delivered as an Oration,
a florid rhetorical composition, expressly intended to secure the
attention of an audience not easy to hold as listeners. It succeeded
in doing this, and also in being as curiously misunderstood and
misrepresented as if it had been a political harangue. This gave it more
local notoriety than it might otherwise have attained, so that, as I
learn, one ingenious person made use of its title as an advertisement to
a production of his own.
The commonest mode of misrepresentation was this: qualified
propositions, the whole meaning of which depended on the qualifications,
were stripped of these and taken as absolute. Thus, the attempt to
establish a presumption against giving poisons to sick persons was
considered as equivalent to condemning the use of these substances.
The only important inference the writer has been able to draw from the
greater number of the refutations of his opinions which have been kindly
sent him, is that the preliminary education of the Medical Profession is
not always what it ought to be.
One concession he is willing to make, whatever sacrifice of pride it
may involve. The story of Massasoit, which has furnished a coral, as it
were, for some teething critics, when subjected to a powerful logical
analysis, though correct in its essentials, proves to have been told
with exceptionable breadth of statement, and therefore (to resume
the metaphor) has been slightly rounded off at its edges, so as to
be smoother for any who may wish to bite upon it hereafter. In
other respects the Discourse has hardly been touched. It is only an
individual's expression, in his own way, of opinions entertained by
hundreds of the Medical Profession in every civilized country, and has
nothing in it which on revision the writer sees cause to retract or
modify. The superstitions it attacks lie at the very foundation of
Homoeopathy, and of almost every form of medical charlatanism. Still
the mere routinists and unthinking artisans in most callings dislike
whatever shakes the dust out of their traditions, and it may be
unreasonable to expect that Medicine will always prove an exception to
the rule. One half the opposition which the numerical system of Louis
has met with, as applied to the results of treatment, has been owing
to the fact that it showed the movements of disease to be far more
independent of the kind of practice pursued than was agreeable to the
pride of those whose self-confidence it abated.
The statement, that medicines are more sparingly used in physicians'
families than in most others, admits of a very natural explanation,
without putting a harsh construction upon it, which it was not
intended to admit. Outside pressure is less felt in the physician's own
household; that is all. If this does not sometimes influence him to give
medicine, or what seems to be medicine, when among those who have more
confidence in drugging than his own family commonly has, the learned
Professor Dunglison is hereby requested to apologize for his definition
of the word Placebo, or to expunge it from his Medical Dictionary.
One thing is certain. A loud outcry on a slight touch reveals the weak
spot in a profession, as well as in a patient. It is a doubtful policy
to oppose the freest speech in those of our own number who are trying to
show us where they honestly believe our weakness lies. Vast as are
the advances of our Science and Art, may it not possibly prove on
examination that we retain other old barbarisms beside the use of the
astrological sign of Jupiter, with which we endeavor to insure good luck
to our prescriptions? Is it the act of a friend or a foe to try to point
them out to our brethren when asked to address them, and is the speaker
to subdue the constitutional habit of his style to a given standard,
under penalty of giving offence to a grave assembly?
“Homoeopathy and its Kindred Delusions” was published nearly twenty
years ago, and has been long out of print, so that the author tried in
vain to procure a copy until the kindness of a friend supplied him with
the only one he has had for years. A foolish story reached his ears that
he was attempting to buy up stray copies for the sake of suppressing it.
This edition was in the press at that very time.
Many of the arguments contained in the Lectures have lost whatever
novelty they may have possessed. All its predictions have been submitted
to the formidable test of time. They appear to have stood it, so far,
about as well as most uninspired prophecies; indeed, some of them
require much less accommodation than certain grave commentators employ
in their readings of the ancient Prophets.
If some statistics recently published are correct, Homoeopathy has made
very slow progress in Europe.
In all England, as it appears, there are hardly a fifth more
Homoeopathic practitioners than there are students attending Lectures at
the Massachusetts Medical College at the present time. In America it has
undoubtedly proved more popular and lucrative, yet how loose a hold it
has on the public confidence is shown by the fact that, when a specially
valued life, which has been played with by one of its agents, is
seriously threatened, the first thing we expect to hear is that a
regular practitioner is by the patient's bed, and the Homoeopathic
counsellor overruled or discarded. Again, how many of the ardent and
capricious persons who embraced Homoeopathy have run the whole round of
pretentious novelties;--have been boarded at water-cure establishments,
closeted with uterine and other specialists, and finally wandered over
seas to put themselves in charge of foreign celebrities, who dosed them
as lustily as they were ever dosed before they took to globules! It
will surprise many to learn to what a shadow of a shade Homoeopathy
has dwindled in the hands of many of its noted practitioners. The
itch-doctrine is treated with contempt. Infinitesimal doses are replaced
by full ones whenever the fancy-practitioner chooses. Good Homoeopathic
reasons can be found for employing anything that anybody wants to
employ. Homoeopathy is now merely a name, an unproved theory, and a box
of pellets pretending to be specifics, which, as all of us know, fail
ignominiously in those cases where we would thankfully sacrifice all our
prejudices and give the world to have them true to their promises.
Homoeopathy has not died out so rapidly as Tractoration. Perhaps it was
well that it should not, for it has taught us a lesson of the healing
faculty of Nature which was needed, and for which many of us have made
proper acknowledgments. But it probably does more harm than good to
medical science at the present time, by keeping up the delusion of
treating everything by specifics,--the old barbarous notion that sick
people should feed on poisons [Lachesis, arrow-poison, obtained from a
serpent (Pulte). Crotalus horridus, rattlesnake's venom (Neidhard). The
less dangerous Pediculus capitis is the favorite remedy of Dr. Mure, the
English “Apostle of Homoeopathy.” These are examples of the retrograde
current setting towards barbarism] against which a part of the Discourse
at the beginning of this volume is directed.
The infinitesimal globules have not become a curiosity as yet, like
Perkins's Tractors. But time is a very elastic element in Geology and
Prophecy. If Daniel's seventy weeks mean four hundred and ninety years,
as the learned Prideaux and others have settled it that they do, the
“not many years” of my prediction may be stretched out a generation or
two beyond our time, if necessary, when the prophecy will no doubt prove
true.
It might be fitting to add a few words with regard to the Essay on the
Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever. But the whole question I consider
to be now transferred from the domain of medical inquiry to the
consideration of Life Insurance agencies and Grand Juries. For the
justification of this somewhat sharply accented language I must refer
the reader to the paper itself for details which I regret to have been
forced to place on permanent record.
BOSTON, January, 1861.
A SECOND PREFACE.
These Lectures and Essays are arranged in the order corresponding to
the date of their delivery or publication. They must, of course, be read
with a constant reference to these dates, by such as care to read
them. I have not attempted to modernize their aspect or character in
presenting them, in this somewhat altered connection, to the public.
Several of them were contained in a former volume which received its
name from the Address called “Currents and Counter-Currents.” Some of
those contained in the former volume have been replaced by others. The
Essay called “Mechanism of Vital Actions” has been transferred to a
distinct collection of Miscellaneous essays, forming a separate volume.
I had some intention of including with these papers an Essay on
Intermittent Fever in New England, which received one of the Boylston
prizes in 1837, and was published in the following year. But as this
was upon a subject of local interest, chiefly, and would have taken up a
good deal of room, I thought it best to leave it out, trusting that
the stray copies to be met with in musty book-shops would sufficiently
supply the not very extensive or urgent demand for a paper almost half a
century old.
Some of these papers created a little stir when they first fell from
the press into the pool of public consciousness. They will slide in very
quietly now in this new edition, and find out for themselves whether the
waters are those of Lethe, or whether they are to live for a time as not
wholly unvalued reminiscences.
March 21, 1883.
PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.
These Essays are old enough now to go alone without staff or crutch
in the shape of Prefaces. A very few words may be a convenience to the
reader who takes up the book and wishes to know what he is likely to
find in it.
HOMOEOPATHY AND ITS KINDRED DELUSIONS.
Homoeopathy has proved lucrative, and so long as it continues to be so
will surely exist,--as surely as astrology, palmistry, and other methods
of getting a living out of the weakness and credulity of mankind and
womankind. Though it has no pretensions to be considered as belonging
among the sciences, it may be looked upon by a scientific man as a
curious object of study among the vagaries of the human mind. Its
influence for good or the contrary may be made a matter of calm
investigation. I have studied it in the Essay before the reader, under
the aspect of an extravagant and purely imaginative creation of its
founder. Since that first essay was written, nearly half a century ago,
we have all had a chance to witness its practical working. Two opposite
inferences may be drawn from its doctrines and practice. The first is
that which is accepted by its disciples. This is that all diseases are
“cured” by drugs. The opposite conclusion is drawn by a much larger
number of persons. As they see that patients are very commonly getting
well under treatment by infinitesimal drugging, which they consider
equivalent to no medication at all, they come to disbelieve in every
form of drugging and put their whole trust in “nature.” Thus experience,
“From seeming evil still educing good,”
has shown that the dealers in this preposterous system of
pseudo-therapeutics have cooperated with the wiser class of
practitioners in breaking up the system of over-dosing and over-drugging
which has been one of the standing reproaches of medical practice. While
keeping up the miserable delusion that diseases were all to be “cured”
by drugging, Homoeopathy has been unintentionally showing that they
would very generally get well without any drugging at all. In the mean
time the newer doctrines of the “mind cure,” the “faith cure,” and the
rest are encroaching on the territory so long monopolized by that most
ingenious of the pseudo-sciences. It would not be surprising if its
whole ground should be taken possession of by these new claimants with
their flattering appeals to the imaginative class of persons open to
such attacks. Similia similabus may prove fatally true for once, if
Homoeopathy is killed out by its new-born rivals.
It takes a very moderate amount of erudition to unearth a charlatan
like the supposed father of the infinitesimal dosing system. The real
inventor of that specious trickery was an Irishman by the name of
Butler. The whole story is to be found in the “Ortus Medicinae” of Van
Helmont. I have given some account of his chapter “Butler” in different
articles, but I would refer the students of our Homoeopathic educational
institutions to the original, which they will find very interesting and
curious.
CURRENTS AND COUNTER-CURRENTS
My attack on over-drugging brought out some hostile comments and
treatment. Thirty years ago I expressed myself with more vivacity than
I should show if I were writing on the same subjects today. Some of
my more lively remarks called out very sharp animadversion. Thus
my illustration of prevention as often better than treatment in the
mother's words to her child which had got a poisonous berry in its
mouth,--“Spit it out!” gave mortal offence to a well-known New York
practitioner and writer, who advised the Massachusetts Medical Society
to spit out the offending speaker. Worse than this was my statement of
my belief that if a ship-load of miscellaneous drugs, with certain
very important exceptions,--drugs, many of which were then often given
needlessly and in excess, as then used “could be sunk to the bottom of
the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse
for the fishes.” This was too bad. The sentence was misquoted, quoted
without its qualifying conditions, and frightened some of my worthy
professional brethren as much as if I had told them to throw all physic
to the dogs. But for the epigrammatic sting the sentiment would have
been unnoticed as a harmless overstatement at the very worst.
Since this lecture was delivered a great and, as I think, beneficial
change has taken place in the practice of medicine. The habit of the
English “general practitioner” of making his profit out of the pills and
potions he administered was ruinous to professional advancement and the
dignity of the physician. When a half-starving medical man felt that he
must give his patient draught and boluses for which he could charge him,
he was in a pitiable position and too likely to persuade himself that
his drugs were useful to his patient because they were profitable
to him. This practice has prevailed a good deal in America, and was
doubtless the source in some measure of the errors I combated.
THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF PUERPERAL FEVER.
This Essay was read before a small Association called “The Society for
Medical Improvement,” and published in a Medical Journal which lasted
but a single year. It naturally attracted less attention than it would
have done if published in such a periodical as the “American Journal of
Medical Sciences.” Still it had its effect, as I have every reason
to believe. I cannot doubt that it has saved the lives of many young
mothers by calling attention to the existence and propagation of
“Puerperal Fever as a Private Pestilence,” and laying down rules for
taking the necessary precautions against it. The case has long been
decided in favor of the views I advocated, but, at the time when I wrote
two of the most celebrated professors of Obstetrics in this country
opposed my conclusions with all the weight of their experience and
position.
This paper was written in a great heat and with passionate indignation.
If I touched it at all I might trim its rhetorical exuberance, but I
prefer to leave it all its original strength of expression. I could not,
if I had tried, have disguised the feelings with which I regarded the
attempt to put out of sight the frightful facts which I brought forward
and the necessary conclusions to which they led. Of course the whole
matter has been looked at in a new point of view since the microbe as
a vehicle of contagion has been brought into light, and explained the
mechanism of that which was plain enough as a fact to all who were not
blind or who did not shut their eyes.
O. W. H.
BEVERLY Farms, Mass., August 3, 1891
HOMOEOPATHY AND ITS KINDRED DELUSIONS
[Two lectures delivered before the Boston Society for the Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge. 1842.]
[When a physician attempts to convince a person, who has fallen into the
Homoeopathic delusion, of the emptiness of its pretensions, he is often
answered by a statement of cases in which its practitioners are thought
to have effected wonderful cures. The main object of the first of these
Lectures is to show, by abundant facts, that such statements, made by
persons unacquainted with the fluctuations of disease and the fallacies
of observation, are to be considered in general as of little or no value
in establishing the truth of a medical doctrine or the utility of a
method of practice.
Those kind friends who suggest to a person suffering from a tedious
complaint, that he “Had better try Homoeopathy,” are apt to enforce
their suggestion by adding, that “at any rate it can do no harm.” This
may or may not be true as regards the individual. But it always does
very great harm to the community to encourage ignorance, error, or
deception in a profession which deals with the life and health of our
fellow-creatures. Whether or not those who countenance Homoeopathy are
guilty of this injustice towards others, the second of these Lectures
may afford them some means of determining.
To deny that good effects may happen from the observance of diet and
regimen when prescribed by Homoeopathists as well as by others, would be
very unfair to them. But to suppose that men with minds so constituted
as to accept such statements and embrace such doctrines as make up
the so-called science of Homoeopathy are more competent than others to
regulate the circumstances which influence the human body in health and
disease, would be judging very harshly the average capacity of ordinary
practitioners.
To deny that some patients may have been actually benefited through
the influence exerted upon their imaginations, would be to refuse
to Homoeopathy what all are willing to concede to every one of those
numerous modes of practice known to all intelligent persons by an
opprobrious title.
So long as the body is affected through the mind, no audacious device,
even of the most manifestly dishonest character, can fail of producing
occasional good to those who yield it an implicit or even a partial
faith. The argument founded on this occasional good would be as
applicable in justifying the counterfeiter and giving circulation to
his base coin, on the ground that a spurious dollar had often relieved a
poor man's necessities.
Homoeopathy has come before our public at a period when the growing
spirit of eclecticism has prepared many ingenious and honest minds to
listen to all new doctrines with a candor liable to degenerate into
weakness. It is not impossible that the pretended evolution of great and
mysterious virtues from infinitely attenuated atoms may have enticed a
few over-refining philosophers, who have slid into a vague belief
that matter subdivided grows less material, and approaches nearer to
a spiritual nature as it requires a more powerful microscope for its
detection.
However this may be, some persons seem disposed to take the ground of
Menzel that the Laity must pass formal judgment between the Physician
and the Homoeopathist, as it once did between Luther and the Romanists.
The practitioner and the scholar must not, therefore, smile at the
amount of time and labor expended in these Lectures upon this shadowy
system; which, in the calm and serious judgment of many of the wisest
members of the medical profession, is not entitled by anything it has
ever said or done to the notoriety of a public rebuke, still less to the
honors of critical martyrdom.]
I.
I have selected four topics for this lecture, the first three of which I
shall touch but slightly, the last more fully. They are
1. The Royal cure of the King's Evil, or Scrofula.
2. The Weapon Ointment, and its twin absurdity, the Sympathetic Powder.
3. The Tar-water mania of Bishop Berkeley.
4. The History of the Metallic Tractors, or Perkinism.
The first two illustrate the ease with which numerous facts are
accumulated to prove the most fanciful and senseless extravagances.
The third exhibits the entire insufficiency of exalted wisdom,
immaculate honesty, and vast general acquirements to make a good
physician of a great bishop.
The fourth shows us the intimate machinery of an extinct delusion, which
flourished only forty years ago; drawn in all its details, as being
a rich and comparatively recent illustration of the pretensions, the
arguments, the patronage, by means of which windy errors have long been,
and will long continue to be, swollen into transient consequence.
All display in superfluous abundance the boundless credulity and
excitability of mankind upon subjects connected with medicine.
“From the time of Edward the Confessor to Queen Anne, the monarchs of
England were in the habit of touching those who were brought to them
suffering with the scrofula, for the cure of that distemper. William
the Third had good sense enough to discontinue the practice, but Anne
resumed it, and, among her other patients, performed the royal operation
upon a child, who, in spite of his, disease, grew up at last into Samuel
Johnson. After laying his hand upon the sufferers, it was customary for
the monarch to hang a gold piece around the neck of each patient. Very
strict precautions were adopted to prevent those who thought more of the
golden angel hung round the neck by a white ribbon, than of relief of
their bodily infirmities, from making too many calls, as they sometimes
attempted to do. According to the statement of the advocates and
contemporaries of this remedy, none ever failed of receiving benefit
unless their little faith and credulity starved their merits. Some are
said to have been cured immediately on the very touch, others did not
so easily get rid of their swellings, until they were touched a second
time. Several cases are related, of persons who had been blind for
several weeks, and months, and obliged even to be led to Whitehall, yet
recovered their sight immediately upon being touched, so as to walk away
without any guide.” So widely, at one period, was the belief diffused,
that, in the course of twelve years, nearly a hundred thousand persons
were touched by Charles the Second. Catholic divines; in disputes upon
the orthodoxy of their church, did not deny that the power had descended
to protestant princes;--Dr. Harpsfield, in his “Ecclesiastical History
of England,” admitted it, and in Wiseman's words, “when Bishop Tooker
would make use of this Argument to prove the Truth of our Church,
Smitheus doth not thereupon go about to deny the Matter of fact; nay,
both he and Cope acknowledge it.” “I myself,” says Wiseman, the best
English surgical writer of his day,[Edinburgh Medical and Surgical
Journal, vol. iii. p. 103.]--“I my self have been a frequent Eye-witness
of many hundred of Cures performed by his Majesties Touch alone, without
any assistance of Chirurgery; and those, many of them such as had tired
out the endeavours of able Chirurgeons before they came hither. It were
endless to recite what I myself have seen, and what I have received
acknowledgments of by Letter, not only from the severall parts of this
Nation, but also from Ireland, Scotland, Jersey, Garnsey. It is needless
also to remember what Miracles of this nature were performed by the very
Bloud of his late Majesty of Blessed memory, after whose decollation
by the inhuman Barbarity of the Regicides, the reliques of that were
gathered on Chips and in Handkerchieffs by the pious Devotes, who could
not but think so great a suffering in so honourable and pious a Cause,
would be attended by an extraordinary assistance of God, and some more
then ordinary a miracle: nor did their Faith deceive them in this there
point, being so many hundred that found the benefit of it.” [Severall
Chirurgicall Treatises. London.1676. p. 246.]
Obstinate and incredulous men, as he tells us, accounted for these cures
in three ways: by the journey and change of air the patients obtained
in coming to London; by the influence of imagination; and the wearing of
gold.
To these objections he answers, 1st. That many of those cured were
inhabitants of the city. 2d. That the subjects of treatment were
frequently infants. 3d. That sometimes silver was given, and sometimes
nothing, yet the patients were cured.
A superstition resembling this probably exists at the present time
in some ignorant districts of England and this country. A writer in a
Medical Journal in the year 1807, speaks of a farmer in Devonshire, who,
being a ninth son of a ninth son, is thought endowed with healing powers
like those of ancient royalty, and who is accustomed one day in every
week to strike for the evil.
I remember that one of my schoolmates told me, when a boy, of a seventh
son of a seventh son, somewhere in Essex County, who touched for the
scrofula, and who used to hang a silver fourpence halfpenny about the
neck of those who came to him, which fourpence halfpenny it was solemnly
affirmed became of a remarkably black color after having been some time
worn, and that his own brother had been subjected to this extraordinary
treatment; but I must add that my schoolmate drew a bow of remarkable
length, strength, and toughness for his tender years.
One of the most curious examples of the fallacy of popular belief and
the uncertainty of asserted facts in medical experience is to be found
in the history of the UNGUENTUM ARMARIUM, or WEAPON OINTMENT.
Fabricius Hildanus, whose name is familiar to every surgical scholar,
and Lord Bacon, who frequently dipped a little into medicine, are
my principal authorities for the few circumstances I shall mention
regarding it. The Weapon Ointment was a preparation used for the healing
of wounds, but instead of its being applied to them, the injured
part was washed and bandaged, and the weapon with which the wound was
inflicted was carefully anointed with the unguent. Empirics, ignorant
barbers, and men of that sort, are said to have especially employed it.
Still there were not wanting some among the more respectable members of
the medical profession who supported its claims. The composition of this
ointment was complicated, in the different formulae given by different
authorities; but some substances addressed to the imagination, rather
than the wound or weapon, entered into all. Such were portions of mummy,
of human blood, and of moss from the skull of a thief hung in chains.
Hildanus was a wise and learned man, one of the best surgeons of his
time. He was fully aware that a part of the real secret of the Unguentum
Armarium consisted in the washing and bandaging the wound and then
letting it alone. But he could not resist the solemn assertions
respecting its efficacy; he gave way before the outcry of facts, and
therefore, instead of denying all their pretensions, he admitted and
tried to account for them upon supernatural grounds. As the virtue of
those applications, he says, which are made to the weapon cannot
reach the wound, and as they can produce no effect without contact, it
follows, of necessity, that the Devil must have a hand in the
business; and as he is by far the most long headed and experienced of
practitioners, he cannot find this a matter of any great difficulty.
Hildanus himself reports, in detail, the case of a lady who had received
a moderate wound, for which the Unguentum Armarium was employed without
the slightest use. Yet instead of receiving this flat case of failure as
any evidence against the remedy, he accounts for its not succeeding
by the devout character of the lady, and her freedom from that
superstitious and over-imaginative tendency which the Devil requires in
those who are to be benefited by his devices.
Lord Bacon speaks of the Weapon Ointment, in his Natural History, as
having in its favor the testimony of men of credit, though, in his own
language, he himself “as yet is not fully inclined to believe it.” His
remarks upon the asserted facts respecting it show a mixture of wise
suspicion and partial belief. He does not like the precise directions
given as to the circumstances under which the animals from which some of
the materials were obtained were to be killed; for he thought it looked
like a provision for an excuse in case of failure, by laying the fault
to the omission of some of these circumstances. But he likes well that
“they do not observe the confecting of the Ointment under any certain
constellation; which is commonly the excuse of magical medicines, when
they fail, that they were not made under a fit figure of heaven.” [This
was a mistake, however, since the two recipes given by Hildanus are both
very explicit as to the aspect of the heavens required for different
stages of the process.] “It was pretended that if the offending weapon
could not be had, it would serve the purpose to anoint a wooden one made
like it.” “This,” says Bacon, “I should doubt to be a device to keep
this strange form of cure in request and use; because many times you
cannot come by the weapon itself.” And in closing his remarks on the
statements of the advocates of the ointment, he says, “Lastly, it
will cure a beast as well as a man, which I like best of all the
rest, because it subjecteth the matter to an easy trial.” It is worth
remembering, that more than two hundred years ago, when an absurd and
fantastic remedy was asserted to possess wonderful power, and when
sensible persons ascribed its pretended influence to imagination, it was
boldly answered that the cure took place when the wounded party did not
know of the application made to the weapon, and even when a brute animal
was the subject of the experiment, and that this assertion, as we all
know it was, came in such a shape as to shake the incredulity of the
keenest thinker of his time. The very same assertion has been since
repeated in favor of Perkinism, and, since that, of Homoeopathy.
The same essential idea as that of the Weapon Ointment reproduced itself
in the still more famous SYMPATHETIC POWDER. This Powder was said to
have the faculty, if applied to the blood-stained garments of a wounded
person, to cure his injuries, even though he were at a great distance at
the time. A friar, returning from the East, brought the recipe to Europe
somewhat before the middle of the seventeenth century. The Grand Duke of
Florence, in which city the friar was residing, heard of his cures, and
tried, but without success, to obtain his secret. Sir Kenehn Digby, an
Englishman well known to fame, was fortunate enough to do him a favor,
which wrought upon his feelings and induced him to impart to his
benefactor the composition of his extraordinary Powder. This English
knight was at different periods of his life an admiral, a theologian, a
critic, a metaphysician, a politician, and a disciple of Alchemy. As is
not unfrequent with versatile and inflammable people, he caught fire at
the first spark of a new medical discovery, and no sooner got home to
England than he began to spread the conflagration.
An opportunity soon offered itself to try the powers of the famous
powder. Mr. J. Howell, having been wounded in endeavoring to part two
of his friends who were fighting a duel, submitted himself to a trial
of the Sympathetic Powder. Four days after he received his wounds, Sir
Kenehn dipped one of Mr. Howell's gaiters in a solution of the Powder,
and immediately, it is said, the wounds, which were very painful,
grew easy, although the patient, who was conversing in a corner of the
chamber, had not, the least idea of what was doing with his garter. He
then returned home, leaving his garter in the hands of Sir Kenelm, who
had hung it up to dry, when Mr. Howell sent his servant in a great hurry
to tell him that his wounds were paining him horribly; the garter was
therefore replaced in the solution of the Powder, “and the patient got
well after five or six days of its continued immersion.”
King James First, his son Charles the First, the Duke of Buckingham,
then prime minister, and all the principal personages of the time, were
cognizant of this fact; and James himself, being curious to know the
secret of this remedy, asked it of Sir Kenelm, who revealed it to him,
and his Majesty had the opportunity of making several trials of its
efficacy, “which all succeeded in a surprising manner.” [Dict. des
Sciences Medieales.]
The king's physician, Dr. Mayerne, was made master of the secret,
which he carried to France and communicated to the Duke of Mayenne, who
performed many cures by means of it, and taught it to his surgeon, who,
after the Duke's death, sold it to many distinguished persons, by whose
agency it soon ceased to be a secret. What was this wonderful substance
which so astonished kings, princes, dukes, knights, and doctors? Nothing
but powdered blue vitriol. But it was made to undergo several processes
that conferred on it extraordinary virtues. Twice or thrice it was to be
dissolved, filtered, and crystallized. The crystals were to be laid in
the sun during the months of June, July, and August, taking care to
turn them carefully that all should be exposed. Then they were to be
powdered, triturated, and again exposed to the sun, again reduced to a
very fine powder, and secured in a vessel, while hot, from the sunshine.
If there seem anything remarkable in the fact of such astonishing
properties being developed by this process, it must be from our
short-sightedness, for common salt and charcoal develop powers quite as
marvellous after a certain number of thumps, stirs, and shakes, from the
hands of modern workers of miracles. In fact the Unguentum Armarium and
Sympathetic Powder resemble some more recent prescriptions; the latter
consisting in an infinite dilution of the common dose in which remedies
are given, and the two former in an infinite dilution of the common
distance at which they are applied.
Whether philosophers, and more especially metaphysicians, have any
peculiar tendency to dabble in drugs and dose themselves with physic,
is a question which might suggest itself to the reader of their
biographies.
When Bishop Berkeley visited the illustrious Malebranche at Paris,
he found him in his cell, cooking in a small pipkin a medicine for an
inflammation of the lungs, from which he was suffering; and the disease,
being unfortunately aggravated by the vehemence of their discussion, or
the contents of the pipkin, carried him off in the course of a few days.
Berkeley himself afforded a remarkable illustration of a truth which
has long been known to the members of one of the learned professions,
namely, that no amount of talent, or of acquirements in other
departments, can rescue from lamentable folly those who, without
something of the requisite preparation, undertake to experiment with
nostrums upon themselves and their neighbors. The exalted character of
Berkeley is thus drawn by Sir James Mackintosh: Ancient learning,
exact science, polished society, modern literature, and the fine arts,
contributed to adorn and enrich the mind of this accomplished man. All
his contemporaries agreed with the satirist in ascribing
“'To Berkeley every virtue under heaven.'
“Even the discerning, fastidious, and turbulent Atterbury said, after an
interview with him, 'So much understanding, so much knowledge, so much
innocence, and such humility, I did not think had been the portion of
any but angels, till I saw this gentleman.'”
But among the writings of this great and good man is an Essay of the
most curious character, illustrating his weakness upon the point in
question, and entitled, “Siris, a Chain of Philosophical Reflections
and Inquiries concerning the Virtues of TAR WATER, and divers other
Subjects,”--an essay which begins with a recipe for his favorite fluid,
and slides by gentle gradations into an examination of the sublimest
doctrines of Plato. To show how far a man of honesty and benevolence,
and with a mind of singular acuteness and depth, may be run away with by
a favorite notion on a subject which his habits and education do not fit
him to investigate, I shall give a short account of this Essay, merely
stating that as all the supposed virtues of Tar Water, made public in
successive editions of his treatise by so illustrious an author, have
not saved it from neglect and disgrace, it may be fairly assumed that
they were mainly imaginary.
The bishop, as is usual in such cases, speaks of himself as
indispensably obliged, by the duty he owes to mankind, to make his
experience public. Now this was by no means evident, nor does it follow
in general, that because a man has formed a favorable opinion of
a person or a thing he has not the proper means of thoroughly
understanding, he shall be bound to print it, and thus give currency
to his impressions, which may be erroneous, and therefore injurious.
He would have done much better to have laid his impressions before some
experienced physicians and surgeons, such as Dr. Mead and Mr. Cheselden,
to have asked them to try his experiment over again, and have been
guided by their answers. But the good bishop got excited; he pleased
himself with the thought that he had discovered a great panacea; and
having once tasted the bewitching cup of self-quackery, like many before
and since his time, he was so infatuated with the draught that he would
insist on pouring it down the throats of his neighbors and all mankind.
The precious fluid was made by stirring a gallon of water with a quart
of tar, leaving it forty-eight hours, and pouring off the clear water.
Such was the specific which the great metaphysician recommended for
averting and curing all manner of diseases. It was, if he might be
believed, a preventive of the small-pox, and of great use in the course
of the disease. It was a cure for impurities of the blood, coughs,
pleurisy, peripneumony, erysipelas, asthma, indigestion, carchexia,
hysterics, dropsy, mortification, scurvy, and hypochondria. It was of
great use in gout and fevers, and was an excellent preservative of
the teeth and gums; answered all the purpose of Elixir Proprietatis,
Stoughton's drops, diet drinks, and mineral waters; was particularly to
be recommended to sea-faring persons, ladies, and men of studious and
sedentary lives; could never be taken too long, but, on the contrary,
produced advantages which sometimes did not begin to show themselves for
two or three months.
“From my representing Tar Water as good for so many things,” says
Berkeley, “some perhaps may conclude it is good for nothing. But charity
obligeth me to say what I know, and what I think, however it may be
taken. Men may censure and object as they please, but I appeal to time
and experiment. Effects misimputed, cases wrong told, circumstances
overlooked, perhaps, too, prejudices and partialities against truth, may
for a time prevail and keep her at the bottom of her well, from whence
nevertheless she emergeth sooner or later, and strikes the eyes of
all who do not keep them shut.” I cannot resist the temptation of
illustrating the bishop's belief in the wonderful powers of his remedy,
by a few sentences from different parts of his essay. “The hardness
of stubbed vulgar constitutions renders them insensible of a thousand
things that fret and gall those delicate people, who, as if their skin
was peeled off, feel to the quick everything that touches them. The
tender nerves and low spirits of such poor creatures would be much
relieved by the use of Tar Water, which might prolong and cheer their
lives.” “It [the Tar Water] may be made stronger for brute beasts, as
horses, in whose disorders I have found it very useful.” “This same
water will also give charitable relief to the ladies, who often want it
more than the parish poor; being many of them never able to make a good
meal, and sitting pale, puny, and forbidden, like ghosts, at their own
table, victims of vapors and indigestion.” It does not appear among the
virtues of Tar Water that “children cried for it,” as for some of our
modern remedies, but the bishop says, “I have known children take it
for above six months together with great benefit, and without any
inconvenience; and after long and repeated experience I do esteem it
a most excellent diet drink, fitted to all seasons and ages.” After
mentioning its usefulness in febrile complaints, he says: “I have had
all this confirmed by my own experience in the late sickly season of the
year one thousand seven hundred and forty-one, having had twenty-five
fevers in my own family cured by this medicinal water, drunk copiously.”
And to finish these extracts with a most important suggestion for the
improvement of the British nation: “It is much to be lamented that our
Insulars who act and think so much for themselves, should yet, from
grossness of air and diet, grow stupid or doat sooner than other people,
who, by virtue of elastic air, water-drinking, and light food, preserve
their faculties to extreme old age; an advantage which may perhaps
be approached, if not equaled, even in these regions, by Tar Water,
temperance, and early hours.”
Berkeley died at the age of about seventy; he might have lived longer,
but his fatal illness was so sudden that there was not time enough to
stir up a quart of the panacea. He was an illustrious man, but he held
two very odd opinions; that tar water was everything, and that the whole
material universe was nothing.
*****
Most of those present have at some time in their lives heard mention
made of the METALLIC TRACTORS, invented by one Dr. Perkins, an American,
and formerly enjoying great repute for the cure of various diseases.
Many have seen or heard of a satirical poem, written by one of our
own countrymen also, about forty years since, and called “Terrible
Tractoration.” The Metallic Tractors are now so utterly abandoned that
I have only by good fortune fallen upon a single one of a pair, to show
for the sake of illustration. For more than thirty years this great
discovery, which was to banish at least half the evils which afflict
humanity, has been sleeping undisturbed in the grave of oblivion. Not a
voice has, for this long period, been raised in its favor; its noble and
learned patrons, its public institutions, its eloquent advocates, its
brilliant promises are all covered with the dust of silent neglect;
and of the generation which has sprung up since the period when it
flourished, very few know anything of its history, and hardly even
the title which in its palmy days it bore of PERKINISM. Taking it as
settled, then, as no one appears to answer for it, that Perkinism is
entirely dead and gone, that both in public and private, officially
and individually, its former adherents even allow it to be absolutely
defunct, I select it for anatomical examination. If this pretended
discovery was made public; if it was long kept before the public; if it
was addressed to the people of different countries; if it was formally
investigated by scientific men, and systematically adopted by benevolent
persons, who did everything in their power to diffuse the knowledge
and practice of it; if various collateral motives, such as interest
and vanity, were embarked in its cause; if, notwithstanding all these
things, it gradually sickened and died, then the conclusion seems a fair
one, that it did not deserve to live. Contrasting its failure with
its high pretensions, it is fair to call it an imposition; whether
an expressly fraudulent contrivance or not, some might be ready to
question. Everything historically shown to have happened concerning the
mode of promulgation, the wide diffusion, the apparent success of this
delusion, the respectability and enthusiasm of its advocates, is
of great interest in showing to what extent and by what means a
considerable part of the community may be led into the belief of that
which is to be eventually considered as an idle folly. If there is any
existing folly, fraudulent or innocent in its origin, which appeals to
certain arguments for its support; provided that the very same arguments
can be shown to have been used for Perkinism with as good reason, they
will at once fall to the ground. Still more, if it shall appear that the
general course of any existing delusion bears a strong resemblance to
that of Perkinism, that the former is most frequently advocated by the
same class of persons who were conspicuous in behalf of the latter, and
treated with contempt or opposed by the same kind of persons who thus
treated Perkinism; if the facts in favor of both have a similar aspect;
if the motives of their originators and propagators may be presumed
to have been similar; then there is every reason to suppose that the
existing folly will follow in the footsteps of the past, and after
displaying a given amount of cunning and credulity in those deceiving
and deceived, will drop from the public view like a fruit which has
ripened into spontaneous rottenness, and be succeeded by the fresh bloom
of some other delusion required by the same excitable portion of the
community.
Dr. Elisha Perkins was born at Norwich, Connecticut, in the year 1740.
He had practised his profession with a good local reputation for many
years, when he fell upon a course of experiments, as it is related,
which led to his great discovery. He conceived the idea that metallic
substances might have the effect of removing diseases, if applied in
a certain manner; a notion probably suggested by the then recent
experiments of Galvani, in which muscular contractions were found to be
produced by the contact of two metals with the living fibre. It was in
1796 that his discovery was promulgated in the shape of the Metallic
Tractors, two pieces of metal, one apparently iron and the other brass,
about three inches long, blunt at one end and pointed at the other.
These instruments were applied for the cure of different complaints,
such as rheumatism, local pains, inflammations, and even tumors, by
drawing them over the affected part very lightly for about twenty
minutes. Dr. Perkins took out a patent for his discovery, and travelled
about the country to diffuse the new practice. He soon found numerous
advocates of his discovery, many of them of high standing and influence.
In the year 1798 the tractors had crossed the Atlantic, and were
publicly employed in the Royal Hospital at Copenhagen. About the same
time the son of the inventor, Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins, carried
them to London, where they soon attracted attention. The Danish
physicians published an account of their cases, containing numerous
instances of alleged success, in a respectable octavo volume. In the
year 1804 an establishment, honored with the name of the Perkinean
Institution, was founded in London. The transactions of this institution
were published in pamphlets, the Perkinean Society had public dinners
at the Crown and Anchor, and a poet celebrated their medical triumph in
strains like these:
“See, pointed metals, blest with power t' appease
The ruthless rage of merciless disease,
O'er the frail part a subtle fluid pour,
Drenched with invisible Galvanic shower,
Till the arthritic staff and crutch forego,
And leap exulting like the bounding roe!”
While all these things were going on, Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins was
calmly pocketing money, so that after some half a dozen years he left
the country with more than ten thousand pounds, which had been paid him
by the believers in Great Britain. But in spite of all this success, and
the number of those interested and committed in its behalf, Perkinism
soon began to decline, and in 1811 the Tractors are spoken of by an
intelligent writer as being almost forgotten. Such was the origin and
duration of this doctrine and practice, into the history of which we
will now look a little more narrowly.
Let us see, then, by whose agency this delusion was established and kept
up; whether it was principally by those who were accustomed to medical
pursuits, or those whose habits and modes of reasoning were different;
whether it was with the approbation of those learned bodies usually
supposed to take an interest in scientific discoveries, or only of
individuals whose claims to distinction were founded upon their position
in society, or political station, or literary eminence; whether the
judicious or excitable classes entered most deeply into it; whether, in
short, the scientific men of that time were deceived, or only intruded
upon, and shouted down for the moment by persons who had no particular
call to invade their precincts.
Not much, perhaps, was to be expected of the Medical Profession in the
way of encouragement. One Dr. Fuller, who wrote in England, himself
a Perkinist, thus expressed his opinion: “It must be an extraordinary
exertion of virtue and humanity for a medical man, whose livelihood
depends either on the sale of drugs, or on receiving a guinea for
writing a prescription, which must relate to those drugs, to say to
his patient, 'You had better purchase a set of Tractors to keep in your
family; they will cure you without the expense of my attendance, or the
danger of the common medical practice.' For very obvious reasons medical
men must never be expected to recommend the use of Perkinism. The
Tractors must trust for their patronage to the enlightened and
philanthropic out of the profession, or to medical men retired from
practice, and who know of no other interest than the luxury of relieving
the distressed. And I do not despair of seeing the day when but very few
of this description as well as private families will be without them.”
Whether the motives assigned by this medical man to his professional
brethren existed or not, it is true that Dr. Perkins did not gain a
great deal at their hands. The Connecticut Medical Society expelled him
in 1797 for violating their law against the use of nostrums, or secret
remedies. The leading English physicians appear to have looked on with
singular apathy or contempt at the miracles which it was pretended were
enacting in the hands of the apostles of the new practice. In looking
over the reviews of the time, I have found little beyond brief
occasional notices of their pretensions; the columns of these journals
being occupied with subjects of more permanent interest. The state of
things in London is best learned, however, from the satirical poem
to which I have already alluded as having been written at the period
referred to. This was entitled, “Terrible Tractoration!! A Poetical
Petition against Galvanizing Trumpery and the Perkinistic Institution.
Most respectfully addressed to the Royal College of Physicians, by
Christopher Caustic, M. D., LL. D., A. S. S., Fellow of the Royal
College of Physicians, Aberdeen, and Honorary Member of no less than
nineteen very learned Societies.” Two editions of this work were
published in London in the years 1803 and 1804, and one or two have been
published in this country.
“Terrible Tractoration” is supposed, by those who never read it, to be
a satire upon the follies of Perkins and his followers. It is, on the
contrary, a most zealous defence of Perkinism, and a fierce attack upon
its opponents, most especially upon such of the medical profession
as treated the subject with neglect or ridicule. The Royal College of
Physicians was the more peculiar object of the attack, but with this
body, the editors of some of the leading periodicals, and several
physicians distinguished at that time, and even now remembered for
their services to science and humanity, were involved in unsparing
denunciations. The work is by no means of the simply humorous character
it might be supposed, but is overloaded with notes of the most seriously
polemical nature. Much of the history of the subject, indeed, is to be
looked for in this volume.
It appears from this work that the principal members of the medical
profession, so far from hailing Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins as another
Harvey or Jenner, looked very coldly upon him and his Tractors; and it
is now evident that, though they were much abused for so doing, they
knew very well what they had to deal with, and were altogether in the
right. The delusion at last attracted such an amount of attention as to
induce Dr. Haygarth and some others of respectable standing to institute
some experiments which I shall mention in their proper place, the result
of which might have seemed sufficient to show the emptiness of the whole
contrivance.
The Royal Society, that learned body which for ages has constituted
the best tribunal to which Britain can appeal in questions of science,
accepted Mr. Perkins's Tractors and the book written about them, passed
the customary vote of thanks, and never thought of troubling itself
further in the investigation of pretensions of such an aspect. It is
not to be denied that a considerable number of physicians did avow
themselves advocates of the new practice; but out of the whole catalogue
of those who were publicly proclaimed as such, no one has ever been
known, so far as I am aware, to the scientific world, except in
connection with the short-lived notoriety of Perkinism. Who were
the people, then, to whose activity, influence, or standing with
the community was owing all the temporary excitement produced by the
Metallic Tractors?
First, those persons who had been induced to purchase a pair of
Tractors. These little bits of brass and iron, the intrinsic value of
which might, perhaps, amount to ninepence, were sold at five guineas a
pair! A man who has paid twenty-five dollars for his whistle is apt to
blow it louder and longer than other people. So it appeared that when
the “Perkinean Society” applied to the possessors of Tractors in the
metropolis to concur in the establishment of a public institution for
the use of these instruments upon the poor, “it was found that only five
out of above a hundred objected to subscribe, on account of their want
of confidence in the efficacy of the practice; and these,” the committee
observes, “there is reason to believe, never gave them a fair trial,
probably never used them in more than one case, and that perhaps a
case in which the Tractors had never been recommended as serviceable.”
“Purchasers of the Tractors,” said one of their ardent advocates, “would
be among the last to approve of them if they had reason to suppose
themselves defrauded of five guineas.” He forgot poor Moses, with his
“gross of green spectacles, with silver rims and shagreen cases.” “Dear
mother,” cried the boy, “why won't you listen to reason? I had them a
dead bargain, or I should not have bought them. The silver rims alone
will sell for double the money.”
But it is an undeniable fact, that many persons of considerable
standing, and in some instances holding the most elevated positions in
society, openly patronized the new practice. In a translation of a work
entitled “Experiments with the Metallic Tractors,” originally published
in Danish, thence rendered successively into German and English, Mr.
Benjamin Perkins, who edited the English edition, has given a copious
enumeration of the distinguished individuals, both in America and
Europe, whose patronage he enjoyed. He goes so far as to signify that
ROYALTY itself was to be included among the number. When the Perkinean
Institution was founded, no less a person than Lord Rivers was elected
President, and eleven other individuals of distinction, among them
Governor Franklin, son of Dr. Franklin, figured as Vice-Presidents. Lord
Henniker, a member of the Royal Society, who is spoken of as a man
of judgment and talents, condescended to patronize the astonishing
discovery, and at different times bought three pairs of Tractors. When
the Tractors were introduced into Europe, a large number of testimonials
accompanied them from various distinguished characters in America, the
list of whom is given in the translation of the Danish work referred to
as follows:
“Those who have individually stated cases, or who have presented their
names to the public as men who approved of this remedy, and acknowledged
themselves instrumental in circulating the Tractors, are fifty-six in
number; thirty-four of whom are physicians and surgeons, and many of
them of the first eminence, thirteen clergymen, most of whom are doctors
of divinity, and connected with the literary institutions of America;
among the remainder are two members of Congress, one professor of
natural philosophy in a college, etc., etc.” It seemed to be taken
rather hardly by Mr. Perkins that the translators of the work which he
edited, in citing the names of the advocates of the Metallic Practice,
frequently omitted the honorary titles which should have been annexed.
The testimonials were obtained by the Danish writer, from a pamphlet
published in America, in which these titles were given in full. Thus
one of these testimonials is from “John Tyler, Esq., a magistrate in the
county of New London, and late Brigadier-General of the militia in
that State.” The “omission of the General's title” is the subject of
complaint, as if this title were sufficient evidence of the commanding
powers of one of the patrons of tractoration. A similar complaint is
made when “Calvin Goddard, Esq., of Plainfield, Attorney at Law, and
a member of the Legislature of the State of Connecticut,” is mentioned
without his titular honors, and even on account of the omission of the
proper official titles belonging to “Nathan Pierce, Esq., Governor and
Manager of the Almshouse of Newburyport.” These instances show the great
importance to be attached to civil and military dignities, in qualifying
their holders to judge of scientific subjects, a truth which has not
been overlooked by the legitimate successors of the Perkinists. In Great
Britain, the Tractors were not less honored than in America, by the
learned and the illustrious. The “Perkinistic Committee” made this
statement in their report: “Mr. Perkins has annually laid before the
public a large collection of new cases communicated to him for that
purpose by disinterested and intelligent characters, from almost every
quarter of Great Britain. In regard to the competency of these vouchers,
it will be sufficient simply to state that, amongst others whose names
have been attached to their communications, are eight professors, in
four different universities, twenty-one regular Physicians, nineteen
Surgeons, thirty Clergymen, twelve of whom are Doctors of Divinity, and
numerous other characters of equal respectability.”
It cannot but excite our notice and surprise that the number of
clergymen both in America and Great Britain who thrust forward their
evidence on this medical topic was singularly large in proportion
to that of the members of the medical profession. Whole pages are
contributed by such worthies as the Rev. Dr. Trotter of Hans Place,
the Rear. Waring Willett, Chaplain to the Earl of Dunmore, the Rev.
Dr. Clarke, Chaplain to the Prince of Wales. The style of these
theologico-medical communications may be seen in the following from a
divine who was also professor in one of the colleges of New England.
“I have used the Tractors with success in several other cases in my
own family, and although, like Naaman the Syrian, I cannot tell why
the waters of Jordan should be better than Abana and Pharpar, rivers
of Damascus; yet since experience has proved them so, no reasoning
can change the opinion. Indeed, the causes of all common facts are, we
think, perfectly well known to us; and it is very probable, fifty or
a hundred years hence, we shall as well know why the Metallic Tractors
should in a few minutes remove violent pains, as we now know why
cantharides and opium will produce opposite effects, namely, we shall
know very little about either excepting facts.” Fifty or a hundred years
hence! if he could have looked forward forty years, he would have
seen the descendants of the “Perkinistic” philosophers swallowing
infinitesimal globules, and knowing and caring as much about the
Tractors as the people at Saratoga Springs do about the waters of Abana
and Pharpar.
I trust it will not be thought in any degree disrespectful to a
profession which we all honor, that I have mentioned the great zeal
of many clergymen in the cause of Perkinism. I hope, too, that I may
without offence suggest the causes which have often led them out of
their own province into one to which their education has no special
reference. The members of that profession ought to be, and commonly are,
persons of benevolent character. Their duties carry them into the midst
of families, and particularly at times when the members of them are
suffering from bodily illness. It is natural enough that a strong desire
should be excited to alleviate sufferings which may have defied
the efforts of professional skill; as natural that any remedy which
recommends itself to the belief or the fancy of the spiritual physician
should be applied with the hope of benefit; and perfectly certain that
the weakness of human nature, from which no profession is exempt,
will lead him to take the most flattering view of its effects upon the
patient; his own sagacity and judgment being staked upon the success of
the trial. The inventor of the Tractors was aware of these truths. He
therefore sent the Tractors gratuitously to many clergymen, accompanied
with a formal certificate that the holder had become entitled to their
possession by the payment of five guineas. This was practised in our
own neighborhood, and I remember finding one of these certificates,
so presented, which proved that amongst the risks of infancy I had to
encounter Perkins's Tractors. Two clergymen of Boston and the vicinity,
both well known to local fame, gave in their testimony to the value
of the instruments thus presented to them; an unusually moderate
proportion, when it is remembered that to the common motives of which
I have spoken was added the seduction of a gift for which the profane
public was expected to pay so largely.
It was remarkable, also, that Perkinism, which had so little success
with the medical and scientific part of the community, found great favor
in the eyes of its more lovely and less obstinate portion. “The lady of
Major Oxholin,”--I quote from Mr. Perkins's volume,--“having been lately
in America, had seen and heard much of the great effects of Perkinism.
Influenced by a most benevolent disposition, she brought these Tractors
and the pamphlet with her to Europe, with a laudable desire of extending
their utility to her suffering countrymen.” Such was the channel by
which the Tractors were conveyed to Denmark, where they soon became the
ruling passion. The workmen, says a French writer, could not manufacture
them fast enough. Women carried them about their persons, and delighted
in bringing them into general use. To what extent the Tractors were
favored with the patronage of English and American ladies, it is of
course not easy to say, except on general principles, as their names
were not brought before the public. But one of Dr. Haygarth's stories
may lead us to conjecture that there was a class of female practitioners
who went about doing good with the Tractors in England as well as in
Denmark. A certain lady had the misfortune to have a spot as big as a
silver penny at the corner of her eye, caused by a bruise, or some such
injury. Another lady, who was a friend of hers, and a strong believer in
Perkinism, was very anxious to try the effects of tractoration upon
this unfortunate blemish. The patient consented; the lady “produced the
instruments, and, after drawing them four or five times over the spot,
declared that it changed to a paler color, and on repeating the use of
them a few minutes longer, that it had almost vanished, and was scarcely
visible, and departed in high triumph at her success.” The lady who
underwent the operation assured the narrator “that she looked in the
glass immediately after, and that not the least visible alteration had
taken place.”
It would be a very interesting question, what was the intellectual
character of those persons most conspicuous in behalf of the Perkinistic
delusion? Such an inquiry might bring to light some principles which
we could hereafter apply to the study of other popular errors. But the
obscurity into which nearly all these enthusiasts have subsided renders
the question easier to ask than to answer. I believe it would have
been found that most of these persons were of ardent temperament and
of considerable imagination, and that their history would show
that Perkinism was not the first nor the last hobby-horse they rode
furiously. Many of them may very probably have been persons of more than
common talent, of active and ingenious minds, of versatile powers and
various acquirements. Such, for instance, was the estimable man to whom
I have repeatedly referred as a warm defender of tractoration, and
a bitter assailant of its enemies. The story tells itself in the
biographical preface to his poem. He went to London with the view
of introducing a hydraulic machine, which he and his Vermont friends
regarded as a very important invention. He found, however, that the
machine was already in common use in that metropolis. A brother Yankee,
then in London, had started the project of a mill, which was to be
carried by the water of the Thames. He was sanguine enough to purchase
one fifth of this concern, which also proved a failure. At about the
same period he wrote the work which proved the great excitement of his
mind upon the subject of the transient folly then before the public.
Originally a lawyer, he was in succession a mechanician, a poet, and an
editor, meeting with far less success in each of these departments
than usually attends men of less varied gifts, but of more tranquil and
phlegmatic composition. But who is ignorant that there is a class of
minds characterized by qualities like those I have mentioned; minds with
many bright and even beautiful traits; but aimless and fickle as the
butterfly; that settle upon every gayly-colored illusion as it opens
into flower, and flutter away to another when the first has dropped its
leaves, and stands naked in the icy air of truth!
Let us now look at the general tenor of the arguments addressed by
believers to sceptics and opponents. Foremost of all, emblazoned at the
head of every column, loudest shouted by every triumphant disputant,
held up as paramount to all other considerations, stretched like an
impenetrable shield to protect the weakest advocate of the great cause
against the weapons of the adversary, was that omnipotent monosyllable
which has been the patrimony of cheats and the currency of dupes from
time immemorial,--Facts! Facts! Facts! First came the published cases
of the American clergymen, brigadier-generals, almshouse governors,
representatives, attorneys, and esquires. Then came the published
cases of the surgeons of Copenhagen. Then followed reports of about
one hundred and fifty cases published in England, “demonstrating the
efficacy of the metallic practice in a variety of complaints both upon
the human body and on horses, etc.” But the progress of facts in Great
Britain did not stop here. Let those who rely upon the numbers of their
testimonials, as being alone sufficient to prove the soundness and
stability of a medical novelty, digest the following from the report
of the Perkinistic Committee. “The cases published [in Great Britain]
amounted, in March last, the date of Mr. Perkins's last publication,
to about five thousand. Supposing that not more than one cure in three
hundred which the Tractors have performed has been published, and the
proportion is probably much greater, it will be seen that the number, to
March last, will have exceeded one million five hundred thousand!”
Next in order after the appeal to what were called facts, came a series
of arguments, which have been so long bruised and battered round in the
cause of every doctrine or pretension, new, monstrous, or deliriously
impossible, that each of them is as odiously familiar to the scientific
scholar as the faces of so many old acquaintances, among the less
reputable classes, to the officers of police.
No doubt many of my hearers will recognize, in the following passages,
arguments they may have heard brought forward with triumphant confidence
in behalf of some doctrine not yet extinct. No doubt some may have
honestly thought they proved something; may have used them with the
purpose of convincing their friends, or of silencing the opponents
of their favorite doctrine, whatever that might be. But any train
of arguments which was contrived for Perkinism, which was just as
applicable to it as to any other new doctrine in the same branch of
science, and which was fully employed against its adversaries forty
years since, might, in common charity, be suffered to slumber in the
grave of Perkinism. Whether or not the following sentences, taken
literally from the work of Mr. Perkins, were the originals of some of
the idle propositions we hear bandied about from time to time, let those
who listen judge.
The following is the test assumed for the new practice: “If diseases are
really removed, as those persons who have practised extensively with
the Tractors declare, it should seem there would be but little doubt
of their being generally adopted; but if the numerous reports of their
efficacy which have been published are forgeries, or are unfounded,
the practice ought to be crushed.” To this I merely add, it has been
crushed.
The following sentence applies to that a priori judging and uncandid
class of individuals who buy their dinners without tasting all the
food there is in the market. “On all discoveries there are persons who,
without descending to any inquiry into the truth, pretend to know, as it
were by intuition, that newly asserted facts are founded in the
grossest errors. These were those who knew that Harvey's report of the
circulation of the blood was a preposterous and ridiculous suggestion,
and in latter later days there were others who knew that Franklin
deserved reproach for declaring that points were preferable to balls for
protecting buildings from lightning.”
Again: “This unwarrantable mode of offering assertion for proof, so
unauthorized and even unprecedented except in the condemnation of
a Galileo, the persecution of a Copernicus, and a few other acts of
inquisitorial authority, in the times of ignorance and superstition,
affords but a lamentable instance of one of his remarks, that this is
far from being the Age of Reason.”
“The most valuable medicines in the Materia Medica act on principles of
which we are totally ignorant. None have ever yet been able to explain
how opium produces sleep, or how bark cures intermittent fevers; and yet
few, it is hoped, will be so absurd as to desist from the use of these
important articles because they know nothing of the principle of their
operations.” Or if the argument is preferred, in the eloquent language
of the Perkinistic poet:
“What though the CAUSES may not be explained,
Since these EFFECTS are duly ascertained,
Let not self-interest, prejudice, or pride,
Induce mankind to set the means aside;
Means which, though simple, are by
Heaven designed to alleviate the woes of human kind.”
This course of argument is so often employed, that it deserves to be
expanded a little, so that its length and breadth may be fairly seen.
A series of what are called facts is brought forward to prove some very
improbable doctrine. It is objected by judicious people, or such as have
devoted themselves to analogous subjects, that these assumed facts are
in direct opposition to all that is known of the course of nature, that
the universal experience of the past affords a powerful presumption
against their truth, and that in proportion to the gravity of these
objections, should be the number and competence of the witnesses. The
answer is a ready one. What do we know of the mysteries of Nature? Do
we understand the intricate machinery of the Universe? When to this is
added the never-failing quotation,
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,”--
the question is thought to be finally disposed of.
Take the case of astrology as an example. It is in itself strange and
incredible that the relations of the heavenly bodies to each other at a
given moment of time, perhaps half a century ago, should have anything
to do with my success or misfortune in any undertaking of to-day.
But what right have I to say it cannot be so? Can I bind the sweet
influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? I do not know by
what mighty magic the planets roll in their fluid paths, confined to
circles as unchanging as if they were rings of steel, nor why the great
wave of ocean follows in a sleepless round upon the skirts of moonlight;
nor can I say from any certain knowledge that the phases of the heavenly
bodies, or even the falling of the leaves of the forest, or the manner
in which the sands lie upon the sea-shore, may not be knit up by
invisible threads with the web of human destiny. There is a class
of minds much more ready to believe that which is at first sight
incredible, and because it is incredible, than what is generally thought
reasonable. Credo quia impossibile est,--“I believe, because it is
impossible,”--is an old paradoxical expression which might be literally
applied to this tribe of persons. And they always succeed in finding
something marvellous, to call out the exercise of their robust faith.
The old Cabalistic teachers maintained that there was not a verse,
line, word, or even letter in the Bible which had not a special efficacy
either to defend the person who rightly employed it, or to injure his
enemies; always provided the original Hebrew was made use of. In the
hands of modern Cabalists every substance, no matter how inert, acquires
wonderful medicinal virtues, provided it be used in a proper state of
purity and subdivision.
I have already mentioned the motives attributed by the Perkinists to the
Medical Profession, as preventing its members from receiving the new
but unwelcome truths. This accusation is repeated in different forms and
places, as, for instance, in the following passage: “Will the medical
man who has spent much money and labor in the pursuit of the arcana
of Physic, and on the exercise of which depends his support in life,
proclaim the inefficacy of his art, and recommend a remedy to
his patient which the most unlettered in society can employ as
advantageously as himself? and a remedy, too, which, unlike the drops,
the pills, the powders, etc., of the Materia Medica, is inconsumable,
and ever in readiness to be employed in successive diseases?”
As usual with these people, much indignation was expressed at any
parallel between their particular doctrine and practice and those of
their exploded predecessors. “The motives,” says the disinterested
Mr. Perkins, “which must have impelled to this attempt at classing the
METALLIC PRACTICE with the most paltry of empyrical projects, are but
too thinly veiled to escape detection.”
To all these arguments was added, as a matter of course, an appeal to
the feelings of the benevolent in behalf of suffering humanity, in the
shape of a notice that the poor would be treated gratis. It is pretty
well understood that this gratuitous treatment of the poor does not
necessarily imply an excess of benevolence, any more than the gratuitous
distribution of a trader's shop-bills is an evidence of remarkable
generosity; in short, that it is one of those things which honest men
often do from the best motives, but which rogues and impostors never
fail to announce as one of their special recommendations. It is
astonishing to see how these things brighten up at the touch of Mr.
Perkins's poet:
“Ye worthy, honored, philanthropic few,
The muse shall weave her brightest wreaths for you,
Who in Humanity's bland cause unite,
Nor heed the shaft by interest aimed or spite;
Like the great Pattern of Benevolence,
Hygeia's blessings to the poor dispense;
And though opposed by folly's servile brood,
ENJOY THE LUXURY OF DOING GOOD.”
Having thus sketched the history of Perkinism in its days of prosperity;
having seen how it sprung into being, and by what means it maintained
its influence, it only remains to tell the brief story of its
discomfiture and final downfall. The vast majority of the sensible part
of the medical profession were contented, so far as we can judge, to
let it die out of itself. It was in vain that the advocates of this
invaluable discovery exclaimed over their perverse and interested
obstinacy,--in vain that they called up the injured ghosts of Harvey,
Galileo, and Copernicus to shame that unbelieving generation; the
Baillies and the Heberdens,--men whose names have come down to us
as synonymous with honor and wisdom,--bore their reproaches in meek
silence, and left them unanswered to their fate. There were some others,
however, who, believing the public to labor under a delusion, thought it
worth while to see whether the charm would be broken by an open trial of
its virtue, as compared with that of some less hallowed formula. It
must be remembered that a peculiar value was attached to the Metallic
Tractors, as made and patented by Mr. Perkins. Dr. Haygarth, of Bath,
performed various experiments upon patients afflicted with different
complaints,--the patients supposing that the real five-guinea Tractors
were employed. Strange to relate, he obtained equally wonderful effects
with Tractors of lead and of wood; with nails, pieces of bone, slate
pencil, and tobacco-pipe. Dr. Alderson employed sham Tractors made of
wood, and produced such effects upon five patients that they returned
solemn thanks in church for their cures. A single specimen of these
cases may stand for all of them. Ann Hill had suffered for some months
from pain in the right arm and shoulder. The Tractors (wooden ones) were
applied, and in the space of five minutes she expressed herself relieved
in the following apostrophe: “Bless me! why, who could have thought it,
that them little things could pull the pain from one. Well, to be sure,
the longer one lives, the more one sees; ah, dear!”
These experiments did not result in the immediate extinction of
Perkinism. Doubtless they were a great comfort to many obstinate
unbelievers, and helped to settle some sceptical minds; but for the real
Perkinistic enthusiasts, it may be questioned whether they would at that
time have changed their opinion though one had risen from the dead to
assure them that it was an error. It perished without violence, by an
easy and natural process. Like the famous toy of Mongolfier, it rose by
means of heated air,--the fevered breath of enthusiastic ignorance,--and
when this grew cool, as it always does in a little while, it collapsed
and fell.
And now, on reviewing the whole subject, how shall we account for the
extraordinary prevalence of the belief in Perkinism among a portion of
what is supposed to be the thinking part of the community?
Could the cures have been real ones, produced by the principle of ANIMAL
MAGNETISM? To this it may be answered that the Perkinists ridiculed the
idea of approximating Mesmer and the founder of their own doctrine, that
nothing like the somnambulic condition seems to have followed the use of
the Tractors, and that neither the exertion of the will nor the powers
of the individual who operated seem to have been considered of any
consequence. Besides, the absolute neglect into which the Tractors soon
declined is good evidence that they were incapable of affording any
considerable and permanent relief in the complaints for the cure of
which they were applied.
Of course a large number of apparent cures were due solely to nature;
which is true under every form of treatment, orthodox or empirical.
Of course many persons experienced at least temporary relief from the
strong impression made upon their minds by this novel and marvellous
method of treatment.
Many, again, influenced by the sanguine hopes of those about them, like
dying people, who often say sincerely, from day to day, that they are
getting better, cheated themselves into a false and short-lived belief
that they were cured; and as happens in such cases, the public never
knew more than the first half of the story.
When it was said to the Perkinists, that whatever effects they produced
were merely through the imagination, they declared (like the advocates
of the ROYAL TOUCH and the UNGUENTUM ARMARIUM) that this explanation
was sufficiently disproved by the fact of numerous and successful cures
which had been witnessed in infants and brute animals. Dr. Haygarth
replied to this, that “in these cases it is not the Patient, but the
Observer, who is deceived by his own imagination,” and that such may be
the fact, we have seen in the case of the good lady who thought she had
conjured away the spot from her friend's countenance, when it remained
just as before.
As to the motives of the inventor and vender of the Tractors, the facts
must be allowed to speak for themselves. But when two little bits of
brass and iron are patented, as an invention, as the result of numerous
experiments, when people are led, or even allowed, to infer that they
are a peculiar compound, when they are artfully associated with a new
and brilliant discovery (which then happened to be Galvanism), when they
are sold at many hundred times their value, and the seller prints his
opinion that a Hospital will suffer inconvenience, “unless it possesses
many sets of the Tractors, and these placed in the hands of the patients
to practise on each other,” one cannot but suspect that they were
contrived in the neighborhood of a wooden nutmeg factory; that legs of
ham in that region are not made of the best mahogany; and that such as
buy their cucumber seed in that vicinity have to wait for the fruit as
long as the Indians for their crop of gunpowder.
*****
The succeeding lecture will be devoted to an examination of the
doctrines of Samuel Hahnemann and his disciples; doctrines which some
consider new and others old; the common title of which is variously
known as Ho-moeopathy, Homoe-op-athy, Homoeo-paith-y, or Hom'pathy, and
the claims of which are considered by some as infinitely important, and
by many as immeasurably ridiculous.
I wish to state, for the sake of any who may be interested in the
subject, that I shall treat it, not by ridicule, but by argument;
perhaps with great freedom, but with good temper and in peaceable
language; with very little hope of reclaiming converts, with no desire
of making enemies, but with a firm belief that its pretensions and
assertions cannot stand before a single hour of calm investigation.
II.
It may be thought that a direct attack upon the pretensions of
HOMOEOPATHY is an uncalled-for aggression upon an unoffending doctrine
and its peaceful advocates.
But a little inquiry will show that it has long assumed so hostile a
position with respect to the Medical Profession, that any trouble I, or
any other member of that profession, may choose to bestow upon it may be
considered merely as a matter of self-defence. It began with an attempt
to show the insignificance of all existing medical knowledge. It not
only laid claim to wonderful powers of its own, but it declared the
common practice to be attended with the most positively injurious
effects, that by it acute diseases are aggravated, and chronic diseases
rendered incurable. It has at various times brought forward collections
of figures having the air of statistical documents, pretending to show
a great proportional mortality among the patients of the Medical
Profession, as compared with those treated according to its own rules.
Not contented with choosing a name of classical origin for itself, it
invented one for the whole community of innocent physicians, assuring
them, to their great surprise, that they were all ALLOPATHISTS, whether
they knew it or not, and including all the illustrious masters of the
past, from Hippocrates down to Hunter, under the same gratuitous title.
The line, then, has been drawn by the champions of the new doctrine;
they have lifted the lance, they have sounded the charge, and are
responsible for any little skirmishing which may happen.
But, independently of any such grounds of active resistance, the subject
involves interests so disproportioned to its intrinsic claims, that it
is no more than an act of humanity to give it a public examination. If
the new doctrine is not truth, it is a dangerous, a deadly error. If it
is a mere illusion, and acquires the same degree of influence that we
have often seen obtained by other illusions, there is not one of my
audience who may not have occasion to deplore the fatal credulity which
listened to its promises.
I shall therefore undertake a sober examination of its principles, its
facts, and some points of its history. The limited time at my disposal
requires me to condense as much as possible what I have to say, but
I shall endeavor to be plain and direct in expressing it. Not one
statement shall be made which cannot be supported by unimpeachable
reference: not one word shall be uttered which I am not as willing to
print as to speak. I have no quibbles to utter, and I shall stoop
to answer none; but, with full faith in the sufficiency of a plain
statement of facts and reasons, I submit the subject to the discernment
of my audience.
The question may be asked in the outset,--Have you submitted the
doctrines you are professing to examine to the test of long-repeated and
careful experiment; have you tried to see whether they were true or not?
To this I answer, that it is abundantly evident, from what has often
happened, that it would be of no manner of use for me to allege the
results of any experiments I might have instituted. Again and again have
the most explicit statements been made by the most competent persons of
the utter failure of all their trials, and there were the same abundant
explanations offered as used to be for the Unguentum Armarium and the
Metallic Tractors. I could by no possibility perform any experiments
the result of which could not be easily explained away so as to be of no
conclusive significance. Besides, as arguments in favor of Homoeopathy
are constantly addressed to the public in journals, pamphlets, and even
lectures, by inexperienced dilettanti, the same channel must be open to
all its opponents.
It is necessary, for the sake of those to whom the whole subject may
be new, to give in the smallest possible compass the substance of
the Homoeopathic Doctrine. Samuel Hahnemann, its founder, is a German
physician, now living in Paris, [Hahnemann died in 1843 at the age of
eighty-seven years. In 1796 he published the first paper containing his
peculiar notions; in 1805 his first work on the subject; in 1810 his
somewhat famous “Organon of the Healing Art;” the next year what
he called the “Pure Materia Medica;” and in 1828 his last work, the
“Treatise on Chronic Diseases.” He has therefore been writing at
intervals on his favorite subject for nearly half a century.
The one great doctrine which constitutes the basis of Homoeopathy as a
system is expressed by the Latin aphorism, “SIMILIA SIBILIBUS CURANTUR,”
or like cures like, that is, diseases are cured by agents capable
of producing symptoms resembling those found in the disease under
treatment. A disease for Hahnemann consists essentially in a group
of symptoms. The proper medicine for any disease is the one which is
capable of producing a similar group of symptoms when given to a healthy
person.
It is of course necessary to know what are the trains of symptoms
excited by different substances, when administered to persons in health,
if any such can be shown to exist. Hahnemann and his disciples give
catalogues of the symptoms which they affirm were produced upon
themselves or others by a large number of drugs which they submitted to
experiment.
The second great fact which Hahnemann professes to have established is
the efficacy of medicinal substances reduced to a wonderful degree of
minuteness or dilution. The following account of his mode of preparing
his medicines is from his work on Chronic Diseases, which has not, I
believe, yet been translated into English. A grain of the substance,
if it is solid, a drop if it is liquid, is to be added to about a third
part of one hundred grains of sugar of milk in an unglazed porcelain
capsule which has had the polish removed from the lower part of its
cavity by rubbing it with wet sand; they are to be mingled for an
instant with a bone or horn spatula, and then rubbed together for six
minutes; then the mass is to be scraped together from the mortar and
pestle, which is to take four minutes; then to be again rubbed for six
minutes. Four minutes are then to be devoted to scraping the powder into
a heap, and the second third of the hundred grains of sugar of milk
to be added. Then they are to be stirred an instant and rubbed six
minutes,--again to be scraped together four minutes and forcibly rubbed
six; once more scraped together for four minutes, when the last third
of the hundred grains of sugar of milk is to be added and mingled by
stirring with the spatula; six minutes of forcible rubbing, four of
scraping together, and six more (positively the last six) of rubbing,
finish this part of the process.
Every grain of this powder contains the hundredth of a grain of the
medicinal substance mingled with the sugar of milk. If, therefore, a
grain of the powder just prepared is mingled with another hundred grains
of sugar of milk, and the process just described repeated, we shall have
a powder of which every grain contains the hundredth of the hundredth,
or the ten thousandth part of a grain of the medicinal substance. Repeat
the same process with the same quantity of fresh sugar of milk, and
every grain of your powder will contain the millionth of a grain of the
medicinal substance. When the powder is of this strength, it is ready
to employ in the further solutions and dilutions to be made use of in
practice.
A grain of the powder is to be taken, a hundred drops of alcohol are
to be poured on it, the vial is to be slowly turned for a few minutes,
until the powder is dissolved, and two shakes are to be given to it. On
this point I will quote Hahnemann's own words. “A long experience and
multiplied observations upon the sick lead me within the last few
years to prefer giving only two shakes to medicinal liquids, whereas I
formerly used to give ten.” The process of dilution is carried on in
the same way as the attenuation of the powder was done; each successive
dilution with alcohol reducing the medicine to a hundredth part of the
quantity of that which preceded it. In this way the dilution of the
original millionth of a grain of medicine contained in the grain of
powder operated on is carried successively to the billionth, trillionth,
quadrillionth, quintillionth, and very often much higher fractional
divisions. A dose of any of these medicines is a minute fraction of a
drop, obtained by moistening with them one or more little globules of
sugar, of which Hahnemann says it takes about two hundred to weigh a
grain.
As an instance of the strength of the medicines prescribed by Hahnemann,
I will mention carbonate of lime. He does not employ common chalk, but
prefers a little portion of the friable part of an oystershell. Of this
substance, carried to the sextillionth degree, so much as one or two
globules of the size mentioned can convey is a common dose. But for
persons of very delicate nerves it is proper that the dilution should
be carried to the decillionth degree. That is, an important medicinal
effect is to be expected from the two hundredth or hundredth part of
the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of
the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the
millionth of the millionth of a grain of oyster-shell. This is only
the tenth degree of potency, but some of his disciples profess to have
obtained palpable effects from “much higher dilutions.”
The third great doctrine of Hahnemann is the following. Seven eighths
at least of all chronic diseases are produced by the existence in the
system of that infectious disorder known in the language of science
by the appellation of PSORA, but to the less refined portion of the
community by the name of ITCH. In the words of Hahnemann's “Organon,”
“This Psora is the sole true and fundamental cause that produces all
the other countless forms of disease, which, under the names of nervous
debility, hysteria, hypochondriasis, insanity, melancholy, idiocy,
madness, epilepsy, and spasms of all kinds, softening of the bones,
or rickets, scoliosis and cyphosis, caries, cancer, fungua haematodes,
gout,--yellow jaundice and cyanosis, dropsy,--”
[“The degrees of DILUTION must not be confounded with those of POTENCY.
Their relations may be seen by this table:
lst dilution,--One hundredth of a drop or grain.
2d “ One ten thousandth.
3d “ One millionth, marked I.
4th “ One hundred millionth.
5th “ One ten thousand millionth.
6th “ One million millionth, or one billionth, marked II.
7th “ One hundred billionth.
8th “ One ten thousand billionth.
9th “ One million billionth, or one trillionth, marked III.
10th “ One hundred trillionth.
11th “ One ten thousand trillionth.
12th “ One million trillionth, or one quadrillionth, marked
IV.,--and so on indefinitely.
The large figures denote the degrees of POTENCY.]
“gastralgia, epistaxis, haemoptysis,--asthma and suppuration of the
lungs,--megrim, deafness, cataract and amaurosis,--paralysis, loss of
sense, pains of every kind, etc., appear in our pathology as so many
peculiar, distinct, and independent diseases.”
For the last three centuries, if the same authority may be trusted,
under the influence of the more refined personal habits which have
prevailed, and the application of various external remedies which repel
the affection from the skin; Psora has revealed itself in these numerous
forms of internal disease, instead of appearing, as in former periods,
under the aspect of an external malady.
These are the three cardinal doctrines of Hahnemann, as laid down in
those standard works of Homoeopathy, the “Organon” and the “Treatise on
Chronic Diseases.”
Several other principles may be added, upon all of which he insists with
great force, and which are very generally received by his disciples.
1. Very little power is allowed to the curative efforts of nature.
Hahnemann goes so far as to say that no one has ever seen the simple
efforts of nature effect the durable recovery of a patient from a
chronic disease. In general, the Homoeopathist calls every recovery
which happens under his treatment a cure.
2. Every medicinal substance must be administered in a state of the
most perfect purity, and uncombined with any other. The union of several
remedies in a single prescription destroys its utility, and, according
to the “Organon,” frequently adds a new disease.
3. A large number of substances commonly thought to be inert develop
great medicinal powers when prepared in the manner already described;
and a great proportion of them are ascertained to have specific
antidotes in case their excessive effects require to be neutralized.
4. Diseases should be recognized, as far as possible, not by any of the
common names imposed upon them, as fever or epilepsy, but as individual
collections of symptoms, each of which differs from every other
collection.
5. The symptoms of any complaint must be described with the most
minute exactness, and so far as possible in the patient's own words. To
illustrate the kind of circumstances the patient is expected to record,
I will mention one or two from the 313th page of the “Treatise on
Chronic Diseases,”--being the first one at which I opened accidentally.
“After dinner, disposition to sleep; the patient winks.”
“After dinner, prostration and feeling of weakness (nine days after
taking the remedy).”
This remedy was that same oyster-shell which is to be prescribed
“fractions of the sextillionth or decillionth degree.” According to
Hahnemann, the action of a single dose of the size mentioned does not
fully display itself in some cases until twenty-four or even thirty
days after it is taken, and in such instances has not exhausted its good
effects until towards the fortieth or fiftieth day,--before which time
it would be absurd and injurious to administer a new remedy.
So much for the doctrines of Hahnemann, which have been stated without
comment, or exaggeration of any of their features, very much as any
adherent of his opinions might have stated them, if obliged to compress
them into so narrow a space.
Does Hahnemann himself represent Homoeopathy as it now exists? He
certainly ought to be its best representative, after having created it,
and devoted his life to it for half a century. He is spoken of as the
great physician of the time, in most, if not all Homoeopathic works. If
he is not authority on the subject of his own doctrines, who is? So far
as I am aware, not one tangible discovery in the so-called science has
ever been ascribed to any other observer; at least, no general principle
or law, of consequence enough to claim any prominence in Homoeopathic
works, has ever been pretended to have originated with any of his
illustrious disciples. He is one of the only two Homoeopathic writers
with whom, as I shall mention, the Paris publisher will have anything to
do upon his own account. The other is Jahr, whose Manual is little more
than a catalogue of symptoms and remedies. If any persons choose to
reject Hahnemann as not in the main representing Homoeopathy, if they
strike at his authority, if they wink out of sight his deliberate and
formally announced results, it is an act of suicidal rashness; for upon
his sagacity and powers of observation, and experience, as embodied in
his works, and especially in his Materia Medica, repose the foundations
of Homoeopathy as a practical system.
So far as I can learn from the conflicting statements made upon the
subject, the following is the present condition of belief.
1. All of any note agree that the law Similia similibus is the only
fundamental principle in medicine. Of course if any man does not agree
to this the name Homoeopathist can no longer be applied to him with
propriety.
2. The belief in and employment of the infinitesimal doses is general,
and in some places universal, among the advocates of Homoeopathy; but a
distinct movement has been made in Germany to get rid of any restriction
to the use of these doses, and to employ medicines with the same license
as other practitioners.
3. The doctrine of the origin of most chronic diseases in Psora,
notwithstanding Hahnemann says it cost him twelve years of study and
research to establish the fact and its practical consequences, has
met with great neglect and even opposition from very many of his own
disciples.
It is true, notwithstanding, that, throughout most of their writings
which I have seen, there runs a prevailing tone of great deference to
Hahnemann's opinions, a constant reference to his authority, a general
agreement with the minor points of his belief, and a pretence of
harmonious union in a common faith. [Those who will take the trouble
to look over Hull's Translation of Jahr's Manual may observe how little
comparative space is given to remedies resting upon any other authority
than that of Hahnemann.]
Many persons, and most physicians and scientific men, would be satisfied
with the statement of these doctrines, and examine them no further.
They would consider it vastly more probable that any observer in so
fallacious and difficult a field of inquiry as medicine had been led
into error, or walked into it of his own accord, than that such numerous
and extraordinary facts had really just come to light. They would feel a
right to exercise the same obduracy towards them as the French Institute
is in the habit of displaying when memoirs or models are offered to it
relating to the squaring of the circle or perpetual motion; which it is
the rule to pass over without notice. They would feel as astronomers and
natural philosophers must have felt when, some half a dozen years ago,
an unknown man came forward, and asked for an opportunity to demonstrate
to Arago and his colleagues that the moon and planets were at a distance
of a little more than a hundred miles from the earth. And so they would
not even look into Homoeopathy, though all its advocates should exclaim
in the words of Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins, vender of the Metallic
Tractors, that “On all discoveries there are persons who, without
descending to any inquiry into the truth, pretend to know, as it were
by intuition, that newly asserted facts are founded in the grossest
errors.” And they would lay their heads upon their pillows with a
perfectly clear conscience, although they were assured that they were
behaving in the same way that people of old did towards Harvey, Galileo,
and Copernicus, the identical great names which were invoked by Mr.
Benjamin Douglass Perkins.
But experience has shown that the character of these assertions is
not sufficient to deter many, from examining their claims to belief.
I therefore lean but very slightly on the extravagance and extreme
apparent singularity of their pretensions. I might have omitted them,
but on the whole it seemed more just to the claims of my argument
to suggest the vast complication of improbabilities involved in the
statements enumerated. Every one must of course judge for himself as to
the weight of these objections, which are by no means brought forward as
a proof of the extravagance of Homoeopathy, but simply as entitled to
a brief consideration before the facts of the case are submitted to our
scrutiny.
The three great asserted discoveries of Hahnemann are entirely
unconnected with and independent of each other. Were there any natural
relation between them it would seem probable enough that the discovery
of the first would have led to that of the others. But assuming it to be
a fact that diseases are cured by remedies capable of producing symptoms
like their own, no manifest relation exists between this fact and
the next assertion, namely, the power of the infinitesimal doses. And
allowing both these to be true, neither has the remotest affinity to
the third new doctrine, that which declares seven eighths of all chronic
diseases to be owing to Psora.
This want of any obvious relation between Hahnemann's three cardinal
doctrines appears to be self-evident upon inspection. But if, as is
often true with his disciples, they prefer the authority of one of their
own number, I will refer them to Dr. Trinks's paper on the present state
of Homoeopathy in Europe, with which, of course, they are familiar, as
his name is mentioned as one of the most prominent champions of their
faith, in their American official organ. It would be a fact without a
parallel in the history, not merely of medicine, but of science, that
three such unconnected and astonishing discoveries, each of them a
complete revolution of all that ages of the most varied experience had
been taught to believe, should spring full formed from the brain of a
single individual.
Let us look a moment at the first of his doctrines. Improbable though
it may seem to some, there is no essential absurdity involved in the
proposition that diseases yield to remedies capable of producing like
symptoms. There are, on the other hand, some analogies which lend a
degree of plausibility to the statement. There are well-ascertained
facts, known from the earliest periods of medicine, showing that, under
certain circumstances, the very medicine which, from its known effects,
one would expect to aggravate the disease, may contribute to its relief.
I may be permitted to allude, in the most general way, to the case in
which the spontaneous efforts of an overtasked stomach are quieted by
the agency of a drug which that organ refuses to entertain upon any
terms. But that every cure ever performed by medicine should have
been founded upon this principle, although without the knowledge of a
physician; that the Homoeopathic axiom is, as Hahnemann asserts, “the
sole law of nature in therapeutics,” a law of which nothing more than
a transient glimpse ever presented itself to the innumerable host of
medical observers, is a dogma of such sweeping extent, and pregnant
novelty, that it demands a corresponding breadth and depth of
unquestionable facts to cover its vast pretensions.
So much ridicule has been thrown upon the pretended powers of the
minute doses that I shall only touch upon this point for the purpose of
conveying, by illustrations, some shadow of ideas far transcending the
powers of the imagination to realize. It must be remembered that these
comparisons are not matters susceptible of dispute, being founded
on simple arithmetical computations, level to the capacity of any
intelligent schoolboy. A person who once wrote a very small pamphlet
made some show of objecting to calculations of thus kind, on the ground
that the highest dilutions could easily be made with a few ounces of
alcohol. But he should have remembered that at every successive dilution
he lays aside or throws away ninety-nine hundredths of the fluid on
which he is operating, and that, although he begins with a drop, he only
prepares a millionth, billionth, trillionth, and similar fractions of
it, all of which, added together, would constitute but a vastly minute
portion of the drop with which he began. But now let us suppose we take
one single drop of the Tincture of Camomile, and that the whole of this
were to be carried through the common series of dilutions.
A calculation nearly like the following was made by Dr. Panvini, and may
be readily followed in its essential particulars by any one who chooses.
For the first dilution it would take 100 drops of alcohol.
For the second dilution it would take 10,000 drops, or about a pint.
For the third dilution it would take 100 pints.
For the fourth dilution it would take 10,000 pints, or more than 1,000
gallons, and so on to the ninth dilution, which would take ten billion
gallons, which he computed would fill the basin of Lake Agnano, a body
of water two miles in circumference. The twelfth dilution would of
course fill a million such lakes. By the time the seventeenth degree of
dilution should be reached, the alcohol required would equal in quantity
the waters of ten thousand Adriatic seas. Trifling errors must be
expected, but they are as likely to be on one side as the other, and any
little matter like Lake Superior or the Caspian would be but a drop in
the bucket.
Swallowers of globules, one of your little pellets, moistened in
the mingled waves of one million lakes of alcohol, each two miles in
circumference, with which had been blended that one drop of Tincture
of Camomile, would be of precisely the strength recommended for that
medicine in your favorite Jahr's Manual, “against the most sudden,
frightful, and fatal diseases!” [In the French edition of 1834, the
proper doses of the medicines are mentioned, and Camomile is marked
IV. Why are the doses omitted in Hull's Translation, except in three
instances out of the whole two hundred remedies, notwithstanding the
promise in the preface that “some remarks upon the doses used may
be found at the head of each medicine”? Possibly because it makes
no difference whether they are employed in one Homoeopathic dose or
another; but then it is very singular that such precise directions
were formerly given in the same work, and that Hahnemann's “experience”
should have led him to draw the nice distinctions we have seen in a
former part of this Lecture (p. 44).]
And proceeding on the common data, I have just made a calculation
which shows that this single drop of Tincture of Camomile, given in the
quantity ordered by Jahr's Manual, would have supplied every individual
of the whole human family, past and present, with more than five billion
doses each, the action of each dose lasting about four days.
Yet this is given only at the quadrillionth, or fourth degree of
potency, and various substances are frequently administered at
the decillionth or tenth degree, and occasionally at still higher
attenuations with professed medicinal results. Is there not in this as
great an exception to all the hitherto received laws of nature as in the
miracle of the loaves and fishes? Ask this question of a Homoeopathist,
and he will answer by referring to the effects produced by a very minute
portion of vaccine matter, or the extraordinary diffusion of odors. But
the vaccine matter is one of those substances called morbid poisons, of
which it is a peculiar character to multiply themselves, when introduced
into the system, as a seed does in the soil. Therefore the hundredth
part of a grain of the vaccine matter, if no more than this is employed,
soon increases in quantity, until, in the course of about a week, it is
a grain or more, and can be removed in considerable drops. And what is
a very curious illustration of Homoeopathy, it does not produce its most
characteristic effects until it is already in sufficient quantity
not merely to be visible, but to be collected for further use. The
thoughtlessness which can allow an inference to be extended from a
product of disease possessing this susceptibility of multiplication when
conveyed into the living body, to substances of inorganic origin, such
as silex or sulphur, would be capable of arguing that a pebble may
produce a mountain, because an acorn can become a forest.
As to the analogy to be found between the alleged action of the
infinitely attenuated doses, and the effects of some odorous substances
which possess the extraordinary power of diffusing their imponderable
emanations through a very wide space, however it may be abused in
argument, and rapidly as it evaporates on examination, it is not like
that just mentioned, wholly without meaning. The fact of the vast
diffusion of some odors, as that of musk or the rose, for instance, has
long been cited as the most remarkable illustration of the divisibility
of matter, and the nicety of the senses. And if this were compared with
the effects of a very minute dose of morphia on the whole system, or the
sudden and fatal impression of a single drop of prussic acid, or,
with what comes still nearer, the poisonous influence of an atmosphere
impregnated with invisible malaria, we should find in each of these
examples an evidence of the degree to which nature, in some few
instances, concentrates powerful qualities in minute or subtile forms of
matter. But if a man comes to me with a pestle and mortar in his hand,
and tells me that he will take a little speck of some substance which
nobody ever thought to have any smell at all, as, for instance, a grain
of chalk or of charcoal, and that he will, after an hour or two of
rubbing and scraping, develop in a portion of it an odor which, if the
whole grain were used, would be capable of pervading an apartment, a
house, a village, a province, an empire, nay, the entire atmosphere of
this broad planet upon which we tread; and that from each of fifty or
sixty substances he can in this way develop a distinct and hitherto
unknown odor: and if he tries to show that all this is rendered quite
reasonable by the analogy of musk and roses, I shall certainly be
justified in considering him incapable of reasoning, and beyond the
reach of my argument. What if, instead of this, he professes to develop
new and wonderful medicinal powers from the same speck of chalk or
charcoal, in such proportions as would impregnate every pond, lake,
river, sea, and ocean of our globe, and appeals to the same analogy in
favor of the probability of his assertion.
All this may be true, notwithstanding these considerations. But so
extraordinary would be the fact, that a single atom of substances which
a child might swallow without harm by the teaspoonful could, by an easy
mechanical process, be made to develop such inconceivable powers, that
nothing but the strictest agreement of the most cautious experimenters,
secured by every guaranty that they were honest and faithful, appealing
to repeated experiments in public, with every precaution to guard
against error, and with the most plain and peremptory results, should
induce us to lend any credence to such pretensions.
The third doctrine, that Psora, the other name of which you remember, is
the cause of the great majority of chronic diseases, is a startling
one, to say the least. That an affection always recognized as a
very unpleasant personal companion, but generally regarded as a
mere temporary incommodity, readily yielding to treatment in those
unfortunate enough to suffer from it, and hardly known among the
better classes of society, should be all at once found out by a German
physician to be the great scourge of mankind, the cause of their
severest bodily and mental calamities, cancer and consumption, idiocy
and madness, must excite our unqualified surprise. And when the
originator of this singular truth ascribes, as in the page now open
before me, the declining health of a disgraced courtier, the chronic
malady of a bereaved mother, even the melancholy of the love-sick
and slighted maiden, to nothing more nor less than the insignificant,
unseemly, and almost unmentionable ITCH, does it not seem as if the
very soil upon which we stand were dissolving into chaos, over the
earthquake-heaving of discovery?
And when one man claims to have established these three independent
truths, which are about as remote from each other as the discovery
of the law of gravitation, the invention of printing, and that of the
mariner's compass, unless the facts in their favor are overwhelming
and unanimous, the question naturally arises, Is not this man deceiving
himself, or trying to deceive others?
I proceed to examine the proofs of the leading ideas of Hahnemann and
his school.
In order to show the axiom, similia similibus curantur (or like is cured
by like), to be the basis of the healing art,--“the sole law of nature
in therapeutics,”--it is necessary,
1. That the symptoms produced by drugs in healthy persons should be
faithfully studied and recorded.
2. That drugs should be shown to be always capable of curing those
diseases most like their own symptoms.
3. That remedies should be shown not to cure diseases when they do not
produce symptoms resembling those presented in these diseases.
1. The effects of drugs upon healthy persons have been studied by
Hahnemann and his associates. Their results were made known in his
Materia Medica, a work in three large volumes in the French translation,
published about eight years ago. The mode of experimentation appears to
have been, to take the substance on trial, either in common or minute
doses, and then to set down every little sensation, every little
movement of mind or body, which occurred within many succeeding hours
or days, as being produced solely by the substance employed. When I have
enumerated some of the symptoms attributed to the power of the drugs
taken, you will be able to judge how much value is to be ascribed to the
assertions of such observers.
The following list was taken literally from the Materia Medica of
Hahnemann, by my friend M. Vernois, for whose accuracy I am willing
to be responsible. He has given seven pages of these symptoms, not
selected, but taken at hazard from the French translation of the work. I
shall be very brief in my citations.
“After stooping some time, sense of painful weight about the head upon
resuming the erect posture.”
“An itching, tickling sensation at the outer edge of the palm of the
left hand, which obliges the person to scratch.” The medicine was
acetate of lime, and as the action of the globule taken is said to last
twenty-eight days, you may judge how many such symptoms as the last
might be supposed to happen.
Among the symptoms attributed to muriatic acid are these: a catarrh,
sighing, pimples; “after having written a long time with the back a
little bent over, violent pain in the back and shoulder-blades, as
if from a strain,”--“dreams which are not remembered,--disposition to
mental dejection,--wakefulness before and after midnight.”
I might extend this catalogue almost indefinitely. I have not cited
these specimens with any view to exciting a sense of the ridiculous,
which many others of those mentioned would not fail to do, but to show
that the common accidents of sensation, the little bodily inconveniences
to which all of us are subject, are seriously and systematically
ascribed to whatever medicine may have been exhibited, even in the
minute doses I have mentioned, whole days or weeks previously.
To these are added all the symptoms ever said by anybody, whether
deserving confidence or not, as I shall hereafter illustrate, to be
produced by the substance in question.
The effects of sixty-four medicinal substances, ascertained by one
or both of these methods, are enumerated in the Materia Medica
of Hahnemann, which may be considered as the basis of practical
Homoeopathy. In the Manual of Jahr, which is the common guide, so far as
I know, of those who practise Homoeopathy in these regions, two hundred
remedies are enumerated, many of which, however, have never been
employed in practice. In at least one edition there were no means of
distinguishing those which had been tried upon the sick from the others.
It is true that marks have been added in the edition employed here,
which serve to distinguish them; but what are we to think of a standard
practical author on Materia Medica, who at one time omits to designate
the proper doses of his remedies, and at another to let us have any
means of knowing whether a remedy has ever been tried or not, while
he is recommending its employment in the most critical and threatening
diseases?
I think that, from what I have shown of the character of Hahnemann's
experiments, it would be a satisfaction to any candid inquirer to
know whether other persons, to whose assertions he could look
with confidence, confirm these pretended facts. Now there are many
individuals, long and well known to the scientific world, who have tried
these experiments upon healthy subjects, and utterly deny that their
effects have at all corresponded to Hahnemann's assertions.
I will take, for instance, the statements of Andral (and I am not
referring to his well-known public experiments in his hospital) as to
the result of his own trials. This distinguished physician is Professor
of Medicine in the School of Paris, and one of the most widely known and
valued authors upon practical and theoretical subjects the profession
can claim in any country. He is a man of great kindness of character,
a most liberal eclectic by nature and habit, of unquestioned integrity,
and is called, in the leading article of the first number of the
“Homoepathic Examiner,” “an eminent and very enlightened allopathist.”
Assisted by a number of other persons in good health, he experimented
on the effects of cinchona, aconite, sulphur, arnica, and the other most
highly extolled remedies. His experiments lasted a year, and he stated
publicly to the Academy of Medicine that they never produced the
slightest appearance of the symptoms attributed to them. The results of
a man like this, so extensively known as one of the most philosophical
and candid, as well as brilliant of instructors, and whose admirable
abilities and signal liberality are generally conceded, ought to be of
great weight in deciding the question.
M. Double, a well-known medical writer and a physician of high standing
in Paris, had occasion so long ago as 1801, before he had heard of
Homoeopathy, to make experiments upon Cinchona, or Peruvian bark. He and
several others took the drug in every kind of dose for four months, and
the fever it is pretended by Hahnemann to excite never was produced.
M. Bonnet, President of the Royal Society of Medicine of Bordeaux, had
occasion to observe many soldiers during the Peninsular War, who made
use of Cinchona as a preservative against different diseases, but he
never found it to produce the pretended paroxysms.
If any objection were made to evidence of this kind, I would refer to
the express experiments on many of the Homoeopathic substances, which
were given to healthy persons with every precaution as to diet and
regimen, by M. Louis Fleury, without being followed by the slightest of
the pretended consequences. And let me mention as a curious fact, that
the same quantity of arsenic given to one animal in the common form of
the unprepared powder, and to another after having been rubbed up into
six hundred globules, offered no particular difference of activity in
the two cases.
This is a strange contradiction to the doctrine of the development of
what they call dynamic power, by means of friction and subdivision.
In 1835 a public challenge was offered to the best known Homoeopathic
physician in Paris to select any ten substances asserted to produce the
most striking effects; to prepare them himself; to choose one by lot
without knowing which of them he had taken, and try it upon himself or
any intelligent and devoted Homoeopathist, and, waiting his own time,
to come forward and tell what substance had been employed. The challenge
was at first accepted, but the acceptance retracted before the time of
trial arrived.
From all this I think it fair to conclude that the catalogues of
symptoms attributed in Homoeopathic works to the influence of various
drugs upon healthy persons are not entitled to any confidence.
2. It is necessary to show, in the next place, that medicinal substances
are always capable of curing diseases most like their own symptoms.
For facts relating to this question we must look to two sources; the
recorded experience of the medical profession in general, and the
results of trials made according to Homoeopathic principles, and capable
of testing the truth of the doctrine.
No person, that I am aware of, has ever denied that in some cases there
exists a resemblance between the effects of a remedy and the symptoms
of diseases in which it is beneficial. This has been recognized, as
Hahnemann himself has shown, from the time of Hippocrates. But according
to the records of the medical profession, as they have been hitherto
interpreted, this is true of only a very small proportion of useful
remedies. Nor has it ever been considered as an established truth that
the efficacy of even these few remedies was in any definite ratio to
their power of producing symptoms more or less like those they cured.
Such was the state of opinion when Hahnemann came forward with the
proposition that all the cases of successful treatment found in the
works of all preceding medical writers were to be ascribed solely to the
operation of the Homoeopathic principle, which had effected the cure,
although without the physician's knowledge that this was the real
secret. And strange as it may seem, he was enabled to give such a
degree of plausibility to this assertion, that any person not acquainted
somewhat with medical literature, not quite familiar, I should rather
say, with the relative value of medical evidence, according to the
sources whence it is derived, would be almost frightened into the
belief, at seeing the pages upon pages of Latin names he has summoned as
his witnesses.
It has hitherto been customary, when examining the writings of authors
of preceding ages, upon subjects as to which they were less enlightened
than ourselves, and which they were very liable to misrepresent, to
exercise some little discretion; to discriminate, in some measure,
between writers deserving confidence and those not entitled to it. But
there is not the least appearance of any such delicacy on the part of
Hahnemann. A large majority of the names of old authors he cites
are wholly unknown to science. With some of them I have been long
acquainted, and I know that their accounts of diseases are no more to be
trusted than their contemporary Ambroise Pare's stories of mermen,
and similar absurdities. But if my judgment is rejected, as being
a prejudiced one, I can refer to Cullen, who mentioned three of
Hahnemann's authors in one sentence, as being “not necessarily bad
authorities; but certainly such when they delivered very improbable
events;” and as this was said more than half a century ago, it could not
have had any reference to Hahnemann. But although not the slightest
sign of discrimination is visible in his quotations,--although for him
a handful of chaff from Schenck is all the same thing as a measure of
wheat from Morgagni,--there is a formidable display of authorities, and
an abundant proof of ingenious researches to be found in each of
the great works of Hahnemann with which I am familiar. [Some painful
surmises might arise as to the erudition of Hahnemann's English
Translator, who makes two individuals of “Zacutus, Lucitanus,” as
well as respecting that of the conductors of an American Homoeopathic
periodical, who suffer the name of the world-renowned Cardanus to be
spelt Cardamus in at least three places, were not this gross ignorance
of course attributable only to the printer.]
It is stated by Dr. Leo-Wolf, that Professor Joerg, of Leipsic, has
proved many of Hahnemann's quotations from old authors to be adulterate
and false. What particular instances he has pointed out I have no means
of learning. And it is probably wholly impossible on this side of the
Atlantic, and even in most of the public libraries of Europe, to
find anything more than a small fraction of the innumerable obscure
publications which the neglect of grocers and trunkmakers has spared
to be ransacked by the all-devouring genius of Homoeopathy. I have
endeavored to verify such passages as my own library afforded me the
means of doing. For some I have looked in vain, for want, as I am
willing to believe, of more exact references. But this I am able to
affirm, that, out of the very small number which I have been able, to
trace back to their original authors, I have found two to be wrongly
quoted, one of them being a gross misrepresentation.
The first is from the ancient Roman author, Caelius Aurelianus;
the second from the venerable folio of Forestus. Hahnemann uses the
following expressions,--if he is not misrepresented in the English
Translation of the 'Organon': “Asclepiades on one occasion cured an
inflammation of the brain by administering a small quantity of wine.”
After correcting the erroneous reference of the Translator, I can find
no such case alluded to in the chapter. But Caelius Aurelianus mentions
two modes of treatment employed by Asclepiades, into both of which the
use of wine entered, as being “in the highest degree irrational and
dangerous.” [Caelius Aurel. De Morb. Acut. et Chron. lib. I. cap. xv.
not xvi. Amsterdam. Wetstein, 1755.]
In speaking of the oil of anise-seed, Hahnemann says that Forestus
observed violent colic caused by its administration. But, as the author
tells the story, a young man took, by the counsel of a surgeon, an acrid
and virulent medicine, the name of which is not given, which brought on
a most cruel fit of the gripes and colic. After this another surgeon was
called, who gave him oil of anise-seed and wine, “which increased his
suffering.” [Observ. et Curat. Med. lib. XXI obs. xiii. Frankfort,
1614.] Now if this was the Homoeopathic remedy, as Hahnemann pretends,
it might be a fair question why the young man was not cured by it. But
it is a much graver question why a man who has shrewdness and learning
enough to go so far after his facts, should think it right to treat them
with such astonishing negligence or such artful unfairness.
Even if every word he had pretended to take from his old authorities
were to be found in them, even if the authority of every one of these
authors were beyond question, the looseness with which they are used to
prove whatever Hahnemann chooses is beyond the bounds of credibility.
Let me give one instance to illustrate the character of this man's
mind. Hahnemann asserts, in a note annexed to the 110th paragraph of
the “Organon,” that the smell of the rose will cause certain persons to
faint. And he says in the text that substances which produce peculiar
effects of this nature on particular constitutions cure the same
symptoms in people in general. Then in another note to the same
paragraph he quotes the following fact from one of the last sources one
would have looked to for medical information, the Byzantine Historians.
“It was by these means (i.e. Homoeopathically) that the Princess Eudosia
with rose-water restored a person who had fainted!”
Is it possible that a man who is guilty of such pedantic folly as
this,--a man who can see a confirmation of his doctrine in such a
recovery as this,--a recovery which is happening every day, from
a breath of air, a drop or two of water, untying a bonnet-string,
loosening a stay-lace, and which can hardly help happening, whatever
is done,--is it possible that a man, of whose pages, not here and there
one, but hundreds upon hundreds are loaded with such trivialities, is
the Newton, the Columbus, the Harvey of the nineteenth century!
The whole process of demonstration he employs is this. An experiment is
instituted with some drug upon one or more healthy persons. Everything
that happens for a number of days or weeks is, as we have seen, set
down as an effect of the medicine. Old volumes are then ransacked
promiscuously, and every morbid sensation or change that anybody ever
said was produced by the drug in question is added to the list of
symptoms. By one or both of these methods, each of the sixty-four
substances enumerated by Hahnemann is shown to produce a very large
number of symptoms, the lowest in his scale being ninety-seven, and the
highest fourteen hundred and ninety-one. And having made out this
list respecting any drug, a catalogue which, as you may observe in any
Homoeopathic manual, contains various symptoms belonging to every organ
of the body, what can be easier than to find alleged cures in every
medical author which can at once be attributed to the Homoeopathic
principle; still more if the grave of extinguished credulity is called
upon to give up its dead bones as living witnesses; and worst of all, if
the monuments of the past are to be mutilated in favor of “the sole law
of Nature in therapeutics”?
There are a few familiar facts of which great use has been made as an
entering wedge for the Homoeopathic doctrine. They have been suffered
to pass current so long that it is time they should be nailed to
the counter, a little operation which I undertake, with perfect
cheerfulness, to perform for them.
The first is a supposed illustration of the Homoeopathic law found in
the precept given for the treatment of parts which have been frozen, by
friction with snow or similar means. But we deceive ourselves by names,
if we suppose the frozen part to be treated by cold, and not by heat.
The snow may even be actually warmer than the part to which it is
applied. But even if it were at the same temperature when applied, it
never did and never could do the least good to a frozen part, except as
a mode of regulating the application of what? of heat. But the heat must
be applied gradually, just as food must be given a little at a time to
those perishing with hunger. If the patient were brought into a warm
room, heat would be applied very rapidly, were not something interposed
to prevent this, and allow its gradual admission. Snow or iced water is
exactly what is wanted; it is not cold to the part; it is very possibly
warm, on the contrary, for these terms are relative, and if it does not
melt and let the heat in, or is not taken away, the part will remain
frozen up until doomsday. Now the treatment of a frozen limb by heat, in
large or small quantities, is not Homoeopathy.
The next supposed illustration of the Homoeopathic law is the alleged
successful management of burns, by holding them to the fire. This is a
popular mode of treating those burns which are of too little consequence
to require any more efficacious remedy, and would inevitably get well of
themselves, without any trouble being bestowed upon them. It produces
a most acute pain in the part, which is followed by some loss of
sensibility, as happens with the eye after exposure to strong light, and
the ear after being subjected to very intense sounds. This is all it
is capable of doing, and all further notions of its efficacy must be
attributed merely to the vulgar love of paradox. If this example affords
any comfort to the Homoeopathist, it seems as cruel to deprive him of
it as it would be to convince the mistress of the smoke-jack or the
flatiron that the fire does not literally “draw the fire out,” which is
her hypothesis.
But if it were true that frost-bites were cured by cold and burns by
heat, it would be subversive, so far as it went, of the great principle
of Homoeopathy.
For you will remember that this principle is that Like cures Like, and
not that Same cures Same; that there is resemblance and not identity
between the symptoms of the disease and those produced by the drug which
cures it, and none have been readier to insist upon this distinction
than the Homoeopathists themselves. For if Same cures Same, then every
poison must be its own antidote,--which is neither a part of their
theory nor their so-called experience. They have been asked often
enough, why it was that arsenic could not cure the mischief which
arsenic had caused, and why the infectious cause of small-pox did not
remedy the disease it had produced, and then they were ready enough to
see the distinction I have pointed out. O no! it was not the hair of the
same dog, but only of one very much like him!
A third instance in proof of the Homoeopathic law is sought for in the
acknowledged efficacy of vaccination. And how does the law apply to
this? It is granted by the advocates of Homoeopathy that there is a
resemblance between the effects of the vaccine virus on a person in
health and the symptoms of small-pox. Therefore, according to the rule,
the vaccine virus will cure the small-pox, which, as everybody knows, is
entirely untrue. But it prevents small-pox, say the Homoeopathists. Yes,
and so does small-pox prevent itself from ever happening again, and we
know just as much of the principle involved in the one case as in the
other. For this is only one of a series of facts which we are wholly
unable to explain. Small-pox, measles, scarlet-fever, hooping-cough,
protect those who have them once from future attacks; but nettle-rash
and catarrh and lung fever, each of which is just as Homoeopathic to
itself as any one of the others, have no such preservative power. We
are obliged to accept the fact, unexplained, and we can do no more for
vaccination than for the rest.
I come now to the most directly practical point connected with the
subject, namely,--
What is the state of the evidence as to the efficacy of the proper
Homoeopathic treatment in the cure of diseases.
As the treatment adopted by the Homoeopathists has been almost
universally by means of the infinitesimal doses, the question of their
efficacy is thrown open, in common with that of the truth of their
fundamental axiom, as both are tested in practice.
We must look for facts as to the actual working of Homoeopathy to three
sources.
1. The statements of the unprofessional public.
2. The assertions of Homoeopathic practitioners.
3. The results of trials by competent and honest physicians, not pledged
to the system.
I think, after what we have seen of medical facts, as they are
represented by incompetent persons, we are disposed to attribute little
value to all statements of wonderful cures, coming from those who have
never been accustomed to watch the caprices of disease, and have not
cooled down their young enthusiasm by the habit of tranquil observation.
Those who know nothing of the natural progress of a malady, of its
ordinary duration, of its various modes of terminating, of its liability
to accidental complications, of the signs which mark its insignificance
or severity, of what is to be expected of it when left to itself, of how
much or how little is to be anticipated from remedies, those who know
nothing or next to nothing of all these things, and who are in a great
state of excitement from benevolence, sympathy, or zeal for a new
medical discovery, can hardly be expected to be sound judges of facts
which have misled so many sagacious men, who have spent their lives in
the daily study and observation of them. I believe that, after having
drawn the portrait of defunct Perkinism, with its five thousand printed
cures, and its million and a half computed ones, its miracles blazoned
about through America, Denmark, and England; after relating that forty
years ago women carried the Tractors about in their pockets, and workmen
could not make them fast enough for the public demand; and then showing
you, as a curiosity, a single one of these instruments, an odd one of a
pair, which I obtained only by a lucky accident, so utterly lost is the
memory of all their wonderful achievements; I believe, after all this, I
need not waste time in showing that medical accuracy is not to be looked
for in the florid reports of benevolent associations, the assertions
of illustrious patrons, the lax effusions of daily journals, or the
effervescent gossip of the tea-table.
Dr. Hering, whose name is somewhat familiar to the champions of
Homoeopathy, has said that “the new healing art is not to be judged
by its success in isolated cases only, but according to its success in
general, its innate truth, and the incontrovertible nature of its innate
principles.”
We have seen something of “the incontrovertible nature of its innate
principles,” and it seems probable, on the whole, that its success in
general must be made up of its success in isolated cases. Some attempts
have been made, however, to finish the whole matter by sweeping
statistical documents, which are intended to prove its triumphant
success over the common practice.
It is well known to those who have had the good fortune to see the
“Homoeopathic Examiner,” that this journal led off, in its first number,
with a grand display of everything the newly imported doctrine had to
show for itself. It is well remarked, on the twenty-third page of this
article, that “the comparison of bills of mortality among an equal
number of sick, treated by divers methods, is a most poor and lame
way to get at conclusions touching principles of the healing art.” In
confirmation of which, the author proceeds upon the twenty-fifth page
to prove the superiority of the Homoeopathic treatment of cholera,
by precisely these very bills of mortality. Now, every intelligent
physician is aware that the poison of cholera differed so much in its
activity at different times and, places, that it was next to impossible
to form any opinion as to the results of treatment, unless every
precaution was taken to secure the most perfectly corresponding
conditions in the patients treated, and hardly even then. Of course,
then, a Russian Admiral, by the name of Mordvinov, backed by a number
of so-called physicians practising in Russian villages, is singularly
competent to the task of settling the whole question of the utility of
this or that kind of treatment; to prove that, if not more than eight
and a half per cent. of those attacked with the disease perished, the
rest owed their immunity to Hahnemann. I can remember when more than
a hundred patients in a public institution were attacked with what, I
doubt not, many Homoeopathic physicians (to say nothing of Homoeopathic
admirals) would have called cholera, and not one of them died, though
treated in the common way, and it is my firm belief that, if such a
result had followed the administration of the omnipotent globules, it
would have been in the mouth of every adept in Europe, from Quin of
London to Spohr of Gandersheim. No longer ago than yesterday, in one of
the most widely circulated papers of this city, there was published an
assertion that the mortality in several Homoeopathic Hospitals was
not quite five in a hundred, whereas, in what are called by the writer
Allopathic Hospitals, it is said to be eleven in a hundred. An honest
man should be ashamed of such an argumentum ad ignorantiam. The
mortality of a hospital depends not merely on the treatment of the
patients, but on the class of diseases it is in the habit of receiving,
on the place where it is, on the season, and many other circumstances.
For instance, there are many hospitals in the great cities of Europe
that receive few diseases of a nature to endanger life, and, on the
other hand, there are others where dangerous diseases are accumulated
out of the common proportion. Thus, in the wards of Louis, at the
Hospital of La Pitie, a vast number of patients in the last stages of
consumption were constantly entering, to swell the mortality of that
hospital. It was because he was known to pay particular attention to
the diseases of the chest that patients laboring under those fatal
affections to an incurable extent were so constantly coming in upon him.
It is always a miserable appeal to the thoughtlessness of the vulgar, to
allege the naked fact of the less comparative mortality in the practice
of one hospital or of one physician than another, as an evidence of the
superiority of their treatment. Other things being equal, it must always
be expected that those institutions and individuals enjoying to the
highest degree the confidence of the community will lose the largest
proportion of their patients; for the simple reason that they will
naturally be looked to by those suffering from the gravest class
of diseases; that many, who know that they are affected with mortal
disease, will choose to die under their care or shelter, while the
subjects of trifling maladies, and merely troublesome symptoms, amuse
themselves to any extent among the fancy practitioners. When, therefore,
Dr. Mublenbein, as stated in the “Homoeopathic Examiner,” and quoted
in yesterday's “Daily Advertiser,” asserts that the mortality among
his patients is only one per cent. since he has practised Homoeopathy,
whereas it was six per cent. when he employed the common mode of
practice, I am convinced by this, his own statement, that the citizens
of Brunswick, whenever they are seriously sick, take good care not to
send for Dr. Muhlenbein!
It is evidently impossible that I should attempt, within the compass of
a single lecture, any detailed examination of the very numerous cases
reported in the Homoeopathic Treatises and Journals. Having been in the
habit of receiving the French “Archives of Homoeopathic Medicine” until
the premature decease of that Journal, I have had the opportunity of
becoming acquainted somewhat with the style of these documents, and
experiencing whatever degree of conviction they were calculated to
produce. Although of course I do not wish any value to be assumed for my
opinion, such as it is, I consider that you are entitled to hear it. So
far, then, as I am acquainted with the general character of the cases
reported by the Homoeopathic physicians, they would for the most part
be considered as wholly undeserving a place in any English, French,
or American periodical of high standing, if, instead of favoring the
doctrine they were intended to support, they were brought forward to
prove the efficacy of any common remedy administered by any common
practitioner. There are occasional exceptions to this remark; but the
general truth of it is rendered probable by the fact that these cases
are always, or almost always, written with the single object of showing
the efficacy of the medicine used, or the skill of the practitioner, and
it is recognized as a general rule that such cases deserve very little
confidence. Yet they may sound well enough, one at a time, to those who
are not fully aware of the fallacies of medical evidence. Let me state
a case in illustration. Nobody doubts that some patients recover under
every form of practice. Probably all are willing to allow that a
large majority, for instance, ninety in a hundred, of such cases as
a physician is called to in daily practice, would recover, sooner or
later, with more or less difficulty, provided nothing were done to
interfere seriously with the efforts of nature.
Suppose, then, a physician who has a hundred patients prescribes to
each of them pills made of some entirely inert substance, as starch,
for instance. Ninety of them get well, or if he chooses to use such
language, he cures ninety of them. It is evident, according to the
doctrine of chances, that there must be a considerable number of
coincidences between the relief of the patient and the administration
of the remedy. It is altogether probable that there will happen two or
three very striking coincidences out of the whole ninety cases, in which
it would seem evident that the medicine produced the relief, though
it had, as we assumed, nothing to do with it. Now suppose that the
physician publishes these cases, will they not have a plausible
appearance of proving that which, as we granted at the outset, was
entirely false? Suppose that instead of pills of starch he employs
microscopic sugarplums, with the five' million billion trillionth
part of a suspicion of aconite or pulsatilla, and then publishes his
successful cases, through the leaden lips of the press, or the living
ones of his female acquaintances,--does that make the impression a less
erroneous one? But so it is that in Homoeopathic works and journals and
gossip one can never, or next to never, find anything but successful
cases, which might do very well as a proof of superior skill, did it not
prove as much for the swindling advertisers whose certificates disgrace
so many of our newspapers. How long will it take mankind to learn that
while they listen to “the speaking hundreds and units,” who make the
world ring with the pretended triumphs they have witnessed, the “dumb
millions” of deluded and injured victims are paying the daily forfeit of
their misplaced confidence!
I am sorry to see, also, that a degree of ignorance as to the natural
course of diseases is often shown in these published cases, which,
although it may not be detected by the unprofessional reader, conveys an
unpleasant impression to those who are acquainted with the subject. Thus
a young woman affected with jaundice is mentioned in the German “Annals
of Clinical Homoeopathy” as having been cured in twenty-nine days by
pulsatilla and nux vomica. Rummel, a well-known writer of the same
school, speaks of curing a case of jaundice in thirty-four days by
Homoeopathic doses of pulsatilla, aconite, and cinchona. I happened to
have a case in my own household, a few weeks since, which lasted about
ten days, and this was longer than I have repeatedly seen it in hospital
practice, so that it was nothing to boast of.
Dr. Munneche of Lichtenburg in Saxony is called to a patient with
sprained ankle who had been a fortnight under the common treatment. The
patient gets well by the use of arnica in a little more than a month
longer, and this extraordinary fact is published in the French “Archives
of Homoeopathic Medicine.”
In the same Journal is recorded the case of a patient who with nothing
more, so far as any proof goes, than influenza, gets down to her shop
upon the sixth day.
And again, the cool way in which everything favorable in a case is set
down by these people entirely to their treatment, may be seen in a case
of croup reported in the “Homoeopathic Gazette” of Leipsic, in which
leeches, blistering, inhalation of hot vapor, and powerful internal
medicine had been employed, and yet the merit was all attributed to one
drop of some Homoeopathic fluid.
I need not multiply these quotations, which illustrate the grounds of
an opinion which the time does not allow me to justify more at length;
other such cases are lying open before me; there is no end to them if
more were wanted; for nothing is necessary but to look into any of the
numerous broken-down Journals of Homoeopathy, the volumes of which may
be found on the shelves of those curious in such matters.
A number of public trials of Homoeopathy have been made in different
parts of the world. Six of these are mentioned in the Manifesto of the
“Homoeopathic Examiner.” Now to suppose that any trial can absolutely
silence people, would be to forget the whole experience of the past.
Dr. Haygarth and Dr. Alderson could not stop the sale of the five-guinea
Tractors, although they proved that they could work the same miracles
with pieces of wood and tobacco-pipe. It takes time for truth to operate
as well as Homoeopathic globules. Many persons thought the results of
these trials were decisive enough of the nullity of the treatment; those
who wish to see the kind of special pleading and evasion by which it is
attempted to cover results which, stated by the “Homoeopathic Examiner”
itself, look exceedingly like a miserable failure, may consult the
opening flourish of that Journal. I had not the intention to speak of
these public trials at all, having abundant other evidence on the point.
But I think it best, on the whole, to mention two of them in a few
words,--that instituted at Naples and that of Andral.
There have been few names in the medical profession, for the last half
century, so widely known throughout the world of science as that of M.
Esquirol, whose life was devoted to the treatment of insanity, and who
was without a rival in that department of practical medicine. It is from
an analysis communicated by him to the “Gazette Medicale de Paris” that
I derive my acquaintance with the account of the trial at Naples by Dr.
Panvini, physician to the Hospital della Pace. This account seems to
be entirely deserving of credit. Ten patients were set apart, and not
allowed to take any medicine at all,--much against the wish of the
Homoeopathic physician. All of them got well, and of course all of them
would have been claimed as triumphs if they had been submitted to the
treatment. Six other slight cases (each of which is specified) got well
under the Homoeopathic treatment, none of its asserted specific effects
being manifested.
All the rest were cases of grave disease; and so far as the trial, which
was interrupted about the fortieth day, extended, the patients grew
worse, or received no benefit. A case is reported on the page before
me of a soldier affected with acute inflammation in the chest, who took
successively aconite, bryonia, nux vomica, and pulsatilla, and after
thirty-eight days of treatment remained without any important change in
his disease. The Homoeopathic physician who treated these patients was
M. de Horatiis, who had the previous year been announcing his wonderful
cures. And M. Esquirol asserted to the Academy of Medicine in 1835,
that this M. de Horatiis, who is one of the prominent personages in the
“Examiner's” Manifesto published in 1840, had subsequently renounced
Homoeopathy. I may remark, by the way, that this same periodical, which
is so very easy in explaining away the results of these trials, makes a
mistake of only six years or a little more as to the time when this at
Naples was instituted.
M. Andral, the “eminent and very enlightened allopathist” of the
“Homoeopathic Examiner,” made the following statement in March, 1835, to
the Academy of Medicine: “I have submitted this doctrine to experiment;
I can reckon at this time from one hundred and thirty to one hundred and
forty cases, recorded with perfect fairness, in a great hospital, under
the eye of numerous witnesses; to avoid every objection--I obtained my
remedies of M. Guibourt, who keeps a Homoeopathic pharmacy, and whose
strict exactness is well known; the regimen has been scrupulously
observed, and I obtained from the sisters attached to the hospital a
special regimen, such as Hahnemann orders. I was told, however, some
months since, that I had not been faithful to all the rules of the
doctrine. I therefore took the trouble to begin again; I have studied
the practice of the Parisian Homoeopathists, as I had studied their
books, and I became convinced that they treated their patients as I had
treated mine, and I affirm that I have been as rigorously exact in the
treatment as any other person.”
And he expressly asserts the entire nullity of the influence of all
the Homoeopathic remedies tried by him in modifying, so far as he could
observe, the progress or termination of diseases. It deserves notice
that he experimented with the most boasted substances,--cinchona,
aconite, mercury, bryonia, belladonna. Aconite, for instance, he says
he administered in more than forty cases of that collection of feverish
symptoms in which it exerts so much power, according to Hahnemann, and
in not one of them did it have the slightest influence, the pulse and
heat remaining as before.
These statements look pretty honest, and would seem hard to be explained
away, but it is calmly said that he “did not know enough of the method
to select the remedies with any tolerable precision.” [“Homoeopathic
Examiner, vol. i. p. 22.]
“Nothing is left to the caprice of the physician.” (In a word, instead
of being dependent upon blind chance, that there is an infallible
law, guided by which; the physician MUST select the proper remedies.')
['Ibid.,' in a notice of Menzel's paper.] Who are they that practice
Homoeopathy, and say this of a man with the Materia Medica of Hahnemann
lying before him? Who are they that send these same globules, on which
he experimented, accompanied by a little book, into families, whose
members are thought competent to employ them, when they deny any such
capacity to a man whose life has been passed at the bedside of patients,
the most prominent teacher in the first Medical Faculty in the world,
the consulting physician of the King of France, and one of the most
renowned practical writers, not merely of his nation, but of his age?
I leave the quibbles by which such persons would try to creep out from
under the crushing weight of these conclusions to the unfortunates who
suppose that a reply is equivalent to an answer.
Dr. Baillie, one of the physicians in the great Hotel Dieu of Paris,
invited two Homoeopathic practitioners to experiment in his wards. One
of these was Curie, now of London, whose works are on the counters
of some of our bookstores, and probably in the hands of some of my
audience. This gentleman, whom Dr. Baillie declares to be an enlightened
man, and perfectly sincere in his convictions, brought his own medicines
from the pharmacy which furnished Hahnemann himself, and employed them
for four or five months upon patients in his ward, and with results
equally unsatisfactory, as appears from Dr. Baillie's statement at
a meeting of the Academy of Medicine. And a similar experiment was
permitted by the Clinical Professor of the Hotel Dieu of Lyons, with the
same complete failure.
But these are old and prejudiced practitioners. Very well, then take the
statement of Dr. Fleury, a most intelligent young physician, who treated
homoeopathically more than fifty patients, suffering from diseases
which it was not dangerous to treat in this way, taking every kind of
precaution as to regimen, removal of disturbing influences, and the
state of the atmosphere, insisted upon by the most vigorous partisans
of the doctrine, and found not the slightest effect produced by the
medicines. And more than this, read nine of these cases, which he has
published, as I have just done, and observe the absolute nullity of
aconite, belladonna, and bryonia, against the symptoms over which they
are pretended to exert such palpable, such obvious, such astonishing
influences. In the view of these statements, it is impossible not to
realize the entire futility of attempting to silence this asserted
science by the flattest and most peremptory results of experiment. Were
all the hospital physicians of Europe and America to devote themselves,
for the requisite period, to this sole pursuit, and were their results
to be unanimous as to the total worthlessness of the whole system in
practice, this slippery delusion would slide through their fingers
without the slightest discomposure, when, as they supposed, they had
crushed every joint in its tortuous and trailing body.
3. I have said, that to show the truth of the Homoeopathic doctrine,
as announced by Hahnemann, it would be necessary to show, in the third
place, that remedies never cure diseases when they are not capable of
producing similar symptoms! The burden of this somewhat comprehensive
demonstration lying entirely upon the advocates of this doctrine, it may
be left to their mature reflections.
It entered into my original plan to treat of the doctrine relating to
Psora, or itch,--an almost insane conception, which I am glad to get rid
of, for this is a subject one does not care to handle without gloves. I
am saved this trouble, however, by finding that many of the disciples
of Hahnemann, those disciples the very gospel of whose faith stands upon
his word, make very light of his authority on this point, although he
himself says, “It has cost me twelve years of study and research to
trace out the source of this incredible number of chronic affections,
to discover this great truth, which remained concealed from all
my predecessors and contemporaries, to establish the basis of its
demonstration, and find out, at the same time, the curative medicines
that were fit to combat this hydra in all its different forms.”
But, in the face of all this, the following remarks are made by Wolff,
of Dresden, whose essays, according to the editor of the “Homoeopathic
Examiner,” “represent the opinions of a large majority of Homoeopathists
in Europe.”
“It cannot be unknown to any one at all familiar with Homoeopathic
literature, that Hahnemann's idea of tracing the large majority of
chronic diseases to actual itch has met with the greatest opposition
from Homoeopathic physicians themselves.” And again, “If the Psoric
theory has led to no proper schism, the reason is to be found in the
fact that it is almost without any influence in practice.”
We are told by Jahr, that Dr. Griesselich, “Surgeon to the Grand Duke
of Baden,” and a “distinguished” Homoeopathist, actually asked Hahnemann
for the proof that chronic diseases, such as dropsy, for instance, never
arise from any other cause than itch; and that, according to common
report, the venerable sage was highly incensed (fort courrouce) with
Dr. Hartmann, of Leipsic, another “distinguished” Homoeopathist, for
maintaining that they certainly did arise from other causes.
And Dr. Fielitz, in the “Homoeopathic Gazette” of Leipsic, after saying,
in a good-natured way, that Psora is the Devil in medicine, and that
physicians are divided on this point into diabolists and exorcists,
declares that, according to a remark of Hahnemann, the whole civilized
world is affected with Psora. I must therefore disappoint any advocate
of Hahnemann who may honor me with his presence, by not attacking a
doctrine on which some of the disciples of his creed would be very happy
to have its adversaries waste their time and strength. I will not meddle
with this excrescence, which, though often used in time of peace, would
be dropped, like the limb of a shell-fish, the moment it was assailed;
time is too precious, and the harvest of living extravagances nods too
heavily to my sickle, that I should blunt it upon straw and stubble.
I will close the subject with a brief examination of some of the
statements made in Homoeopathic works, and more particularly in the
brilliant Manifesto of the “Examiner,” before referred to. And first, it
is there stated under the head of “Homoeopathic Literature,” that
“SEVEN HUNDRED volumes have been issued from the press developing the
peculiarities of the system, and many of them possessed of a scientific
character that savans know well how to respect.” If my assertion were
proper evidence in the case, I should declare, that, having seen a good
many of these publications, from the year 1834, when I bought the work
of the Rev. Thomas Everest, [Dr. Curie speaks of this silly pamphlet as
having been published in 1835.] to within a few weeks, when I received
my last importation of Homaeopathic literature, I have found that all,
with a very few exceptions, were stitched pamphlets varying from
twenty or thirty pages to somewhat less than a hundred, and generally
resembling each other as much as so many spelling-books.
But not being evidence in the case, I will give you the testimony of
Dr. Trinks, of Dresden, who flourishes on the fifteenth page of the same
Manifesto as one of the most distinguished among the Homoeopathists
of Europe. I translate the sentence literally from the “Archives de la
Medecine Homoeopathique.”
“The literature of Homoeopathy, if that honorable name must be applied
to all kinds of book-making, has been degraded to the condition of the
humblest servitude. Productions without talent, without spirit, without
discrimination, flat and pitiful eulogies, exaggerations surpassing the
limits of the most robust faith, invectives against such as dared to
doubt the dogmas which had been proclaimed, or catalogues of remedies;
of such materials is it composed! From distance to distance only, have
appeared some memoirs useful to science or practice, which appear as so
many green oases in the midst of this literary desert.”
It is a very natural as well as a curious question to ask, What has been
the success of Homoeopathy in the different countries of Europe, and
what is its present condition?
The greatest reliance of the advocates of Homoeopathy is of course
on Germany. We know very little of its medical schools, its medical
doctrines, or its medical men, compared with those of England and
France. And, therefore, when an intelligent traveller gives a direct
account from personal inspection of the miserable condition of the
Homoeopathic hospital at Leipsic, the first established in Europe, and
the first on the list of the ever-memorable Manifesto, it is easy enough
answer or elude the fact by citing various hard names of “distinguished”
practitioners, which sound just as well to the uninformed public as if
they were Meckel, or Tiedemann, or Langenbeck. Dr. Leo-Wolf, who, to be
sure, is opposed to Homoeopathy, but who is a scholar, and ought to know
something of his own countrymen, assures us that “Dr. Kopp is the only
German Homoeopathist, if we can call him so, who has been distinguished
as an author and practitioner before he examined this method.” And Dr.
Lee, the same gentleman in whose travels the paragraph relating to
the Leipsic Hospital is to be found, says the same thing. And I will
cheerfully expose myself to any impertinent remark which it might
suggest, to assure my audience that I never heard or saw one authentic
Homoeopathic name of any country in Europe, which I had ever heard
mentioned before as connected with medical science by a single word or
deed sufficient to make it in any degree familiar to my ears, unless
Arnold of Heidelberg is the anatomist who discovered a little nervous
centre, called the otic ganglion. But you need ask no better proof of
who and what the German adherents of this doctrine must be, than the
testimony of a German Homoeopathist as to the wretched character of the
works they manufacture to enforce its claims.
As for the act of this or that government tolerating or encouraging
Homoeopathy, every person of common intelligence knows that it is a mere
form granted or denied according to the general principles of policy
adopted in different states, or the degree of influence which some few
persons who have adopted it may happen to have at court. What may be
the value of certain pompous titles with which many of the advocates of
Homoeopathy are honored, it might be disrespectful to question. But in
the mean time the judicious inquirer may ponder over an extract which
I translate from a paper relating to a personage well known to the
community as Williams the Oculist, with whom I had the honor of crossing
the Atlantic some years since, and who himself handed me two copies of
the paper in question.
“To say that he was oculist of Louis XVIII. and of Charles X., and
that he now enjoys the same title with respect to His Majesty, Louis
Philippe, and the King of the Belgians, is unquestionably to say a great
deal; and yet it is one of the least of his titles to public confidence.
His reputation rests upon a basis more substantial even than the
numerous diplomas with which he is provided, than the membership of the
different medical societies which have chosen him as their associate,”
etc., etc.
And as to one more point, it is time that the public should fully
understand that the common method of supporting barefaced imposture
at the present day, both in Europe and in this country, consists in
trumping up “Dispensaries,” “Colleges of Health,” and other advertising
charitable clap-traps, which use the poor as decoy-ducks for the rich,
and the proprietors of which have a strong predilection for the title
of “Professor.” These names, therefore, have come to be of little or
no value as evidence of the good character, still less of the high
pretensions of those who invoke their authority. Nor does it
follow, even when a chair is founded in connection with a well-known
institution, that it has either a salary or an occupant; so that it may
be, and probably is, a mere harmless piece of toleration on the part of
the government if a Professorship of Homoeopathy is really in existence
at Jena or Heidelberg. And finally, in order to correct the error of any
who might suppose that the whole Medical Profession of Germany has long
since fallen into the delusions of Hahnemann, I will quote two lines
which a celebrated anatomist and surgeon (whose name will occur again in
this lecture in connection with a very pleasing letter) addressed to the
French Academy of Medicine in 1835. “I happened to be in Germany some
months since, at a meeting of nearly six hundred physicians; one of
them wished to bring up the question of Homoeopathy; they would not even
listen to him.” This may have been very impolite and bigoted, but
that is not precisely the point in reference to which I mention the
circumstance.
But if we cannot easily get at Germany, we can very easily obtain exact
information from France and England. I took the trouble to write some
months ago to two friends in Paris, in whom I could place confidence,
for information upon the subject. One of them answered briefly to the
effect that nothing was said about it. When the late Curator of the
Lowell Institute, at his request, asked about the works upon the
subject, he was told that they had remained a long time on the shelves
quite unsalable, and never spoken of.
The other gentleman, [Dr. Henry T. Bigelow, now Professor of Surgery
in Harvard University] whose name is well known to my audience, and who
needs no commendation of mine, had the kindness to procure for me many
publications upon the subject, and some information which sets the whole
matter at rest, so far as Paris is concerned. He went directly to the
Baillieres, the principal and almost the only publishers of all the
Homoeopathic books and journals in that city. The following facts
were taken by him from the account-books of this publishing firm. Four
Homoeopathic Journals have been published in Paris; three of them by the
Baillieres.
The reception they met with may be judged of by showing the number of
subscribers to each on the books of the publishing firm.
A Review published by some other house, which lasted one year, and had
about fifty subscribers, appeared in 1834, 1835.
There were only four Journals of Homoeopathy ever published in Paris.
The Baillieres informed my correspondent that the sale of Homoeopathic
books was much less than formerly, and that consequently they should
undertake to publish no new books upon the subject, except those of Jahr
or Hahnemann. “This man,” says my correspondent,--referring to one of
the brothers,--“the publisher and headquarters of Homoeopathy in Paris,
informs me that it is going down in England and Germany as well as
in Paris.” For all the facts he had stated he pledged himself as
responsible.
Homoeopathy was in its prime in Paris, he said, in 1836 and 1837, and
since then has been going down.
Louis told my correspondent that no person of distinction in Paris had
embraced Homoeopathy, and that it was declining. If you ask who Louis
is, I refer you to the well-known Homoeopathist, Peschier of Geneva, who
says, addressing him, “I respect no one more than yourself; the feeling
which guides your researches, your labors, and your pen, is so honorable
and rare, that I could not but bow down before it; and I own, if there
were any allopathist who inspired me with higher veneration, it would be
him and not yourself whom I should address.”
Among the names of “Distinguished Homoeopathists,” however, displayed in
imposing columns, in the index of the “Homoeopathic Examiner,” are those
of MARJOLIN, AMUSSAT, and BRESCHET, names well known to the world of
science, and the last of them identified with some of the most valuable
contributions which anatomical knowledge has received since the
commencement of the present century. One Dr. Chrysaora, who stands
sponsor for many facts in that Journal, makes the following statement
among the rest: “Professors, who are esteemed among the most
distinguished of the Faculty (Faculty de Medicine), both as to knowledge
and reputation, have openly confessed the power of Homoeopathia in
forms of disease where the ordinary method of practice proved totally
insufficient. It affords me the highest pleasure to select from among
these gentlemen, Marjolin, Amussat, and Breschet.”
Here is a literal translation of an original letter, now in my
possession, from one of these Homoeopathists to my correspondent:--
“DEAR SIR, AND RESPECTED PROFESSIONAL BROTHER:
“You have had the kindness to inform me in your letter that a new
American Journal, the 'New World,' has made use of my name in support of
the pretended Homoeopathic doctrines, and that I am represented as one
of the warmest partisans of Homoeopathy in France.
“I am vastly surprised at the reputation manufactured for me upon the
new continent; but I am obliged, in deference to truth, to reject it
with my whole energy. I spurn far from me everything which relates to
that charlatanism called Homoeopathy, for these pretended doctrines
cannot endure the scrutiny of wise and enlightened persons, who are
guided by honorable sentiments in the practice of the noblest of arts.
“PARIS, 3d November, 1841
“I am, etc., etc.,
“G. BRESCHET,
“Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, Member of the Institute, Surgeon
of Hotel Dieu, and Consulting Surgeon to the King, etc.” [I first saw M.
Breschet's name mentioned in that Journal]
Concerning Amussat, my correspondent writes, that he was informed by
Madame Hahnemann, who converses in French more readily than her husband,
and therefore often speaks for him, that “he was not a physician,
neither Homoeopathist nor Allopathist, but that he was the surgeon
of their own establishment; that is, performed as a surgeon all the
operations they had occasion for in their practice.”
I regret not having made any inquiries as to Marjolin, who, I doubt not,
would strike his ponderous snuff-box until it resounded like the Grecian
horse, at hearing such a doctrine associated with his respectable name.
I was not aware, when writing to Paris, that this worthy Professor,
whose lectures I long attended, was included in these audacious claims;
but after the specimens I have given of the accuracy of the foreign
correspondence of the “Homoeopathic Examiner,” any further information
I might obtain would seem so superfluous as hardly to be worth the
postage.
Homoeopathy may be said, then, to be in a sufficiently miserable
condition in Paris. Yet there lives, and there has lived for years, the
illustrious Samuel Hahnemann, who himself assured my correspondent that
no place offered the advantages of Paris in its investigation, by reason
of the attention there paid to it.
In England, it appears by the statement of Dr. Curie in October, 1839,
about eight years after its introduction into the country, that there
were eighteen Homoeopathic physicians in the United Kingdom, of whom
only three were to be found out of London, and that many of these
practised Homoeopathy in secret.
It will be seen, therefore, that, according to the recent statement of
one of its leading English advocates, Homoeopathy had obtained not quite
half as many practical disciples in England as Perkinism could show for
itself in a somewhat less period from the time of its first promulgation
in that country.
Dr. Curie's letter, dated London, October 30, 1839, says there is “one
in Dublin, Dr. Luther; at Glasgow, Dr. Scott.” The “distinguished”
Chrysaora writes from Paris, dating October 20, 1839, “On the other
hand, Homoeopathy is commencing to make an inroad into England by
the way of Ireland. At Dublin, distinguished physicians have already
embraced the new system, and a great part of the nobility and gentry
of that city have emancipated themselves from the English fashion and
professional authority.”
But the Marquis of Anglesea and Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer patronize
Homoeopathy; the Queen Dowager Adelaide has been treated by a
Homoeopathic physician. “Jarley is the delight of the nobility and
gentry.” “The Royal Family are the patrons of Jarley.”
Let me ask if a Marquis and a Knight are better than two Lords, and
if the Dowager of Royalty is better than Royalty itself, all of which
illustrious dignities were claimed in behalf of Benjamin Douglass
Perkins?
But if the balance is thought too evenly suspended in this case, another
instance can be given in which the evidence of British noblemen and
their ladies is shown to be as valuable in establishing the character of
a medical man or doctrine, as would be the testimony of the Marquis of
Waterford concerning the present condition and prospects of missionary
enterprise. I have before me an octavo volume of more than four hundred
pages, in which, among much similar matter, I find highly commendatory
letters from the Marchioness of Ormond, Lady Harriet Kavanagh, the
Countess of Buckinghamshire, the Right Hon. Viscount Ingestre, M. P.,
and the Most Noble, the Marquis of Sligo,--all addressed to “John
St. John Long, Esq,” a wretched charlatan, twice tried for, and once
convicted of, manslaughter at the Old Bailey.
This poor creature, too, like all of his tribe, speaks of the medical
profession as a great confederation of bigoted monopolists. He, too,
says that “If an innovator should appear, holding out hope to those
in despair, and curing disorders which the faculty have recorded as
irremediable, he is at once, and without inquiry, denounced as an
empiric and an impostor.” He, too, cites the inevitable names of Galileo
and Harvey, and refers to the feelings excited by the great discovery of
Jenner. From the treatment of the great astronomer who was visited with
the punishment of other heretics by the ecclesiastical authorities of a
Catholic country some centuries since, there is no very direct inference
to be drawn to the medical profession of the present time. His name
should be babbled no longer, after having been placarded for the
hundredth time in the pages of St. John Long. But if we are doomed
to see constant reference to the names of Harvey and Jenner in every
worthless pamphlet containing the prospectus of some new trick upon the
public, let us, once for all, stare the facts in the face, and see how
the discoveries of these great men were actually received by the medical
profession.
In 1628, Harvey published his first work upon the circulation. His
doctrines were a complete revolution of the prevailing opinions of all
antiquity. They immediately found both champions and opponents; of
which last, one only, Riolanus, seemed to Harvey worthy of an answer, on
account of his “rank, fame, and learning.” Controversy in science, as in
religion, was not, in those days, carried on with all the courtesy which
our present habits demand, and it is possible that some hard words may
have been applied to Harvey, as it is very certain that he used the most
contemptuous expressions towards others.
Harvey declares in his second letter to Riolanus, “Since the first
discovery of the circulation, hardly a day, or a moment, has passed
without my hearing it both well and ill spoken of; some attack it with
great hostility, others defend it with high encomiums; one party believe
that I have abundantly proved the truth of the doctrine against all
the weight of opposing arguments, by experiments, observations, and
dissections; others think it not yet sufficiently cleared up, and free
from objections.” Two really eminent Professors, Plempius of Louvain,
and Walaeus of Leyden, were among its early advocates.
The opinions sanctioned by the authority of long ages, and the names of
Hippocrates and Galen, dissolved away, gradually, but certainly, before
the demonstrations of Harvey. Twenty-four years after the publication of
his first work, and six years before his death, his bust in marble
was placed in the Hall of the College of Physicians, with a suitable
inscription recording his discoveries.
Two years after this he was unanimously invited to accept the Presidency
of that body; and he lived to see his doctrine established, and all
reputable opposition withdrawn.
There were many circumstances connected with the discovery of Dr. Jenner
which were of a nature to excite repugnance and opposition. The practice
of inoculation for the small-pox had already disarmed that disease of
many of its terrors. The introduction of a contagious disease from a
brute creature into the human system naturally struck the public mind
with a sensation of disgust and apprehension, and a part of the medical
public may have shared these feelings. I find that Jenner's discovery of
vaccination was made public in June, 1798. In July of the same year the
celebrated surgeon, Mr. Cline, vaccinated a child with virus received
from Dr. Jenner, and in communicating the success of this experiment,
he mentions that Dr. Lister, formerly of the Small-Pox Hospital, and
himself, are convinced of the efficacy of the cow-pox. In November
of the same year, Dr. Pearson published his “Inquiry,” containing the
testimony of numerous practitioners in different parts of the kingdom,
to the efficacy of the practice. Dr. HAYGARTH, who was so conspicuous
in exposing the follies of Perkinism, was among the very earliest
to express his opinion in favor of vaccination. In 1801, Dr. Lettsom
mentions the circumstance “as being to the honor of the medical
professors, that they have very generally encouraged this salutary
practice, although it is certainly calculated to lessen their pecuniary
advantages by its tendency to extirpate a fertile source of professional
practice.”
In the same year the Medical Committee of Paris spoke of vaccination in
a public letter, as “the most brilliant and most important discovery
of the eighteenth century.” The Directors of a Society for the
Extermination of the Small-Pox, in a Report dated October 1st, 1807,
“congratulate the public on the very favorable opinion which the Royal
College of Physicians of London, after a most minute and laborious
investigation made by the command of his Majesty, have a second time
expressed on the subject of vaccination, in their Report laid before the
House of Commons, in the last session of Parliament; in consequence of
which the sum of twenty thousand pounds was voted to Dr. Jenner, as
a remuneration for his discovery, in addition to ten thousand pounds
before granted.” (In June, 1802.)
These and similar accusations, so often brought up against the Medical
Profession, are only one mode in which is manifested a spirit of
opposition not merely to medical science, but to all science, and to all
sound knowledge. It is a spirit which neither understands itself nor the
object at which it is aiming. It gropes among the loose records of the
past, and the floating fables of the moment, to glean a few truths or
falsehoods tending to prove, if they prove anything, that the persons
who have passed their lives in the study of a branch of knowledge
the very essence of which must always consist in long and accurate
observation, are less competent to judge of new doctrines in their own
department than the rest of the community. It belongs to the clown in
society, the destructive in politics, and the rogue in practice.
The name of Harvey, whose great discovery was the legitimate result of
his severe training and patient study, should be mentioned only to check
the pretensions of presumptuous ignorance. The example of Jenner,
who gave his inestimable secret, the result of twenty-two years of
experiment and researches, unpurchased, to the public,--when, as was
said in Parliament, he might have made a hundred thousand pounds by it
as well as any smaller sum,--should be referred to only to rebuke the
selfish venders of secret remedies, among whom his early history obliges
us reluctantly to record Samuel Hahnemann. Those who speak of the great
body of physicians as if they were united in a league to support the
superannuated notions of the past against the progress of improvement,
have read the history of medicine to little purpose. The prevalent
failing of this profession has been, on the contrary, to lend a too
credulous ear to ambitious and plausible innovators. If at the present
time ten years of public notoriety have passed over any doctrine
professing to be of importance in medical science, and if it has not
succeeded in raising up a powerful body of able, learned, and ingenious
advocates for its claims, the fault must be in the doctrine and not in
the medical profession.
Homoeopathy has had a still more extended period of trial than this,
and we have seen with what results. It only remains to throw out a few
conjectures as to the particular manner in which it is to break up and
disappear.
1. The confidence of the few believers in this delusion will never
survive the loss of friends who may die of any acute disease, under a
treatment such as that prescribed by Homoeopathy. It is doubtful how far
cases of this kind will be trusted to its tender mercies, but wherever
it acquires any considerable foothold, such cases must come, and with
them the ruin of those who practise it, should any highly valued life be
thus sacrificed.
2. After its novelty has worn out, the ardent and capricious individuals
who constitute the most prominent class of its patrons will return to
visible doses, were it only for the sake of a change.
3. The Semi-Homoeopathic practitioner will gradually withdraw from
the rotten half of his business and try to make the public forget his
connection with it.
4. The ultra Homoeopathist will either recant and try to rejoin the
medical profession; or he will embrace some newer and if possible
equally extravagant doctrine; or he will stick to his colors and go
down with his sinking doctrine. Very few will pursue the course last
mentioned.
A single fact may serve to point out in what direction there will
probably be a movement of the dissolving atoms of Homoeopathy. On the
13th page of the too frequently cited Manifesto of the “Examiner” I read
the following stately paragraph:
“Bigelius, M. D., physician to the Emperor of Russia, whose elevated
reputation is well known in Europe, has been an acknowledged advocate
of Hahnemann's doctrines for several years. He abandoned Allopathia for
Homoeopathia.” The date of this statement is January, 1840. I find on
looking at the booksellers' catalogues that one Bigel, or Bigelius,
to speak more classically, has been at various times publishing
Homoeopathic books for some years.
Again, on looking into the “Encyclographie des Sciences Medicales” for
April, 1840, I find a work entitled “Manual of HYDROSUDOPATHY, or the
Treatment of Diseases by Cold Water, etc., etc., by Dr. Bigel, Physician
of the School of Strasburg, Member of the Medico-Chirurgical Institute
of Naples, of the Academy of St. Petersburg,--Assessor of the College of
the Empire of Russia, Physician of his late Imperial Highness the Grand
Duke Constantine, Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, etc.” Hydrosudopathy
or Hydropathy, as it is sometimes called, is a new medical doctrine or
practice which has sprung up in Germany since Homoeopathy, which it
bids fair to drive out of the market, if, as Dr. Bigel says, fourteen
physicians afflicted with diseases which defied themselves and their
colleagues came to Graefenberg, in the year 1836 alone, and were cured.
Now Dr. Bigel, “whose elevated reputation is well known in Europe,”
writes as follows: “The reader will not fail to see in this defence of
the curative method of Graefenberg a profession of medical faith, and
he will be correct in so doing.” And his work closes with the following
sentence, worthy of so distinguished an individual: “We believe, with
religion, that the water of baptism purifies the soul from its original
sin; let us believe also, with experience, that it is for our corporeal
sins the redeemer of the human body.” If Bigel, Physician to the late
Grand Duke Constantine, is identical with Bigel whom the “Examiner”
calls Physician to the Emperor of Russia, it appears that he is now
actively engaged in throwing cold water at once upon his patients and
the future prospects of Homoeopathy.
If, as must be admitted, no one of Hahnemann's doctrines is received
with tolerable unanimity among his disciples, except the central axiom,
Similia similibus curantur; if this axiom itself relies mainly for its
support upon the folly and trickery of Hahnemann, what can we think of
those who announce themselves ready to relinquish all the accumulated
treasures of our art, to trifle with life upon the strength of these
fantastic theories? What shall we think of professed practitioners of
medicine, if, in the words of Jahr, “from ignorance, for their personal
convenience, or through charlatanism, they treat their patients one
day Homoeopathically and the next Allopathically;” if they parade their
pretended new science before the unguarded portion of the community;
if they suffer their names to be coupled with it wherever it may gain a
credulous patient; and deny all responsibility for its character, refuse
all argument for its doctrines, allege no palliation for the ignorance
and deception interwoven with every thread of its flimsy tissue, when
they are questioned by those competent to judge and entitled to an
answer?
Such is the pretended science of Homoeopathy, to which you are asked to
trust your lives and the lives of those dearest to you. A mingled mass
of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel erudition, of imbecile credulity, and
of artful misrepresentation, too often mingled in practice, if we
may trust the authority of its founder, with heartless and shameless
imposition. Because it is suffered so often to appeal unanswered to the
public, because it has its journals, its patrons, its apostles, some
are weak enough to suppose it can escape the inevitable doom of utter
disgrace and oblivion. Not many years can pass away before the same
curiosity excited by one of Perkins's Tractors will be awakened at the
sight of one of the Infinitesimal Globules. If it should claim a longer
existence, it can only be by falling into the hands of the sordid
wretches who wring their bread from the cold grasp of disease and death
in the hovels of ignorant poverty.
As one humble member of a profession which for more than two thousand
years has devoted itself to the pursuit of the best earthly interests
of mankind, always assailed and insulted from without by such as are
ignorant of its infinite perplexities and labors, always striving in
unequal contest with the hundred-armed giant who walks in the noonday,
and sleeps not in the midnight, yet still toiling, not merely for itself
and the present moment, but for the race and the future, I have lifted
my voice against this lifeless delusion, rolling its shapeless bulk into
the path of a noble science it is too weak to strike, or to injure.
THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF PUERPERAL FEVER
Printed in 1843; reprinted with additions, 1855.
THE POINT AT ISSUE. THE AFFIRMATIVE.
“The disease known as Puerperal Fever is so far contagious as to be
frequently carried from patient to patient by physicians and nurses.” O.
W. Holmes, 1843.
THE NEGATIVE.
“The result of the whole discussion will, I trust, serve, not only to
exalt your views of the value and dignity of our profession, but to
divest your minds of the overpowering dread that you can ever become,
especially to woman, under the extremely interesting circumstances
of gestation and parturition, the minister of evil; that you can ever
convey, in any possible manner, a horrible virus, so destructive in
its effects, and so mysterious in its operations as that attributed to
puerperal fever.”--Professor Hodge, 1852.
“I prefer to attribute them to accident, or Providence, of which I can
form a conception, rather than to a contagion of which I cannot form any
clear idea, at least as to this particular malady.”--Professor Meigs,
1852.
“... in the propagation of which they have no more to do, than with the
propagation of cholera from Jessore to San Francisco, and from Mauritius
to St. Petersburg.”--Professor Meigs, 1854.
---------------------
“I arrived at that certainty in the matter, that I could venture to
foretell what women would be affected with the disease, upon hearing by
what midwife they were to be delivered, or by what nurse they were to
be attended, during their lying-in; and, almost in every instance, my
prediction was verified.”--Gordon, 1795.
“A certain number of deaths is caused every year by the contagion of
puerperal fever, communicated by the nurses and medical attendants.”
Farr, in Fifth Annual Report of Registrar-General of England, 1843.
“... boards of health, if such exist, or, without them, the medical
institutions of a country, should have the power of coercing, or of
inflicting some kind of punishment on those who recklessly go from cases
of puerperal fevers to parturient or puerperal females, without
using due precaution; and who, having been shown the risk, criminally
encounter it, and convey pestilence and death to the persons they are
employed to aid in the most interesting and suffering period of female
existence.” --Copland's Medical Dictionary, Art. Puerperal States and
Diseases, 1852.
“We conceive it unnecessary to go into detail to prove the contagious
nature of this disease, as there are few, if any, American practitioners
who do not believe in this doctrine.”--Dr. Lee, in Additions to Article
last cited.
-----------------------
[INTRODUCTORY NOTE.] It happened, some years ago, that a discussion
arose in a Medical Society of which I was a member, involving the
subject of a certain supposed cause of disease, about which something
was known, a good deal suspected, and not a little feared. The
discussion was suggested by a case, reported at the preceding meeting,
of a physician who made an examination of the body of a patient who had
died with puerperal fever, and who himself died in less than a week,
apparently in consequence of a wound received at the examination, having
attended several women in confinement in the mean time, all of whom, as
it was alleged, were attacked with puerperal fever.
Whatever apprehensions and beliefs were entertained, it was plain that
a fuller knowledge of the facts relating to the subject would be
acceptable to all present. I therefore felt that it would be doing a
good service to look into the best records I could find, and inquire of
the most trustworthy practitioners I knew, to learn what experience
had to teach in the matter, and arrived at the results contained in the
following pages.
The Essay was read before the Boston Society for Medical Improvement,
and, at the request of the Society, printed in the “New England
Quarterly Journal of Medicine and Surgery” for April, 1843. As this
Journal never obtained a large circulation, and ceased to be published
after a year's existence, and as the few copies I had struck off
separately were soon lost sight of among the friends to whom they were
sent, the Essay can hardly be said to have been fully brought before the
Profession.
The subject of this Paper has the same profound interest for me at
the present moment as it had when I was first collecting the terrible
evidence out of which, as it seems to me, the commonest exercise of
reason could not help shaping the truth it involved. It is not merely on
account of the bearing of the question,--if there is a question,--on all
that is most sacred in human life and happiness, that the subject cannot
lose its interest. It is because it seems evident that a fair statement
of the facts must produce its proper influence on a very large
proportion of well-constituted and unprejudiced minds. Individuals may,
here and there, resist the practical bearing of the evidence on their
own feelings or interests; some may fail to see its meaning, as some
persons may be found who cannot tell red from green; but I cannot doubt
that most readers will be satisfied and convinced, to loathing, long
before they have finished the dark obituary calendar laid before them.
I do not know that I shall ever again have so good an opportunity of
being useful as was granted me by the raising of the question which
produced this Essay. For I have abundant evidence that it has made many
practitioners more cautious in their relations with puerperal females,
and I have no doubt it will do so still, if it has a chance of being
read, though it should call out a hundred counterblasts, proving to the
satisfaction of their authors that it proved nothing. And for my part, I
had rather rescue one mother from being poisoned by her attendant, than
claim to have saved forty out of fifty patients to whom I had carried
the disease. Thus, I am willing to avail myself of any hint coming from
without to offer this paper once more to the press. The occasion
has presented itself, as will be seen, in a convenient if not in a
flattering form.
I send this Essay again to the MEDICAL PROFESSION, without the change
of a word or syllable. I find, on reviewing it, that it anticipates and
eliminates those secondary questions which cannot be entertained for a
moment until the one great point of fact is peremptorily settled. In its
very statement of the doctrine maintained it avoids all discussion
of the nature of the disease “known as puerperal fever,” and all the
somewhat stale philology of the word contagion. It mentions, fairly
enough, the names of sceptics, or unbelievers as to the reality of
personal transmission; of Dewees, of Tonnelle, of Duges, of Baudelocque,
and others; of course, not including those whose works were then
unwritten or unpublished; nor enumerating all the Continental writers
who, in ignorance of the great mass of evidence accumulated by British
practitioners, could hardly be called well informed on this subject. It
meets all the array of negative cases,--those in which disease did not
follow exposure,--by the striking example of small-pox, which,
although one of the most contagious of diseases, is subject to the most
remarkable irregularities and seeming caprices in its transmission. It
makes full allowance for other causes besides personal transmission,
especially for epidemic influences. It allows for the possibility
of different modes of conveyance of the destructive principle. It
recognizes and supports the belief t
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