LIBRAflY I ,<^ 
 
 UNIVERSITY C 
 CAiJfOWfX 
 
 
 

THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
WAR, CHOLERA, 
 
 MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 AN APPEAL 
 
 TO Sm BENJAMIN HALL AND THE 
 
 BRITISH PEOPLE. 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES JOHN GARTH WILKINSON, M.D. 
 
 AUTHOR OF " THE HOIAX BODY AXD IT? COXKEXION WITH MAX." 
 
 Pro civibus servandis. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 ROBERT THEOBALD, 2G, PATERNOSTER ROW. 
 
 W. HEADLAND, 15, PRINCES STREET, HANOVER SQ. j 
 
 AND 39, KING'S ROAD, BRIGHTON. 
 
 1854. 
 
 U 
 
 j-f> 
 
LONDON : 
 WALTON AND MITCHELL, PRINTERS, WARDOUR STREET. 
 

 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY 
 OF HEALTH. 
 
 SiRj AND MY Countrymen^ 
 
 Public casualties open the world^s heart and eyes, 
 ensure the progress of decent fairness_, bring man- 
 kind to book, to facts, and to its Maker, and clear 
 away at a heavy, although at the least cost, the 
 obstructions which detain us from better days. The 
 measure of the evil to be got rid of, is given in the 
 weight and stripes of the rod that is used. The 
 present rod is pestilence, the number of whose lashes 
 is not yet complete. For what crime, or for what 
 purpose, is the infliction laid on ? 
 
 There cannot be a doubt that sin is the effectual 
 caller of all misery, and that the cholera is a conse- 
 quence of our sins. These sins however are of many 
 kinds, and it is not about those which have a simply 
 religious bearing that I am going to speak. Physical 
 and medical sins, acknowledged as such in the sight 
 of God also, are those which I shall try to bring 
 home to you, in order that their special repentance, 
 and a regeneration thereafter, may be ensured. Other 
 repentances are urged by other appointed voices, and 
 to them also let us respond. Amen. 
 
 B 
 
 M3637S0 
 
X THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 The British nation, like cverv other in Christen- 
 dom, contains within it many solid and compact 
 organizations which have come from old times, and 
 which have well nigh all power in several great de- 
 partments of action and thonght. Aaiong these are 
 the professions, medical, clerical, legal, and many- 
 others. Huge social fortresses, they stand above the 
 interests of individual houses, nominally for protec- 
 tion and defence. Yet there is not one of them but 
 supports a continual siege against its own times and 
 peoples ; and what is termed reform is always accom- 
 panied by the razing of some part of their outworks, 
 or of the very citadels themselves. Each fortalice is 
 taken up by turns, and becomes the subject of an 
 indispensable providential assault ; the immediate 
 cause of which is some calamity, or hard necessity, 
 which identifies these towers of the past with our 
 straitness, our evils, and our sins ; and preaches a 
 brave. God-fearing self-reliance, and a fresh appeal to 
 the sword of our spirits in the great Battle of Facts. 
 The medical profession, with its black innumerable 
 donjons, is at present brought, by the benignant pes- 
 tilence, into clear opposition with the interests of 
 man ; and it is to summon you into the ranks of the 
 human powers arrayed against it, that my duty now 
 takes up its otherwise unwilling pen. 
 
 The medical profession, as such, is confessedly 
 powerless in the presence of cholera. Medical science 
 itself has the disease in its most virulent form. Not 
 a remedy keeps upon its irritable stomach from day 
 to day. There is no power of holding anything 
 healing, but the whole Pharmacopoeia rushes with 
 noisome velocity through this miserable art. Con- 
 
OLD PHYSIC HAS THE CHOLERA. 6 
 
 vulsed and blue-cold, half death and half physic, it 
 chatters out its horrible statistics. In place of a 
 fountain of health, it is, in science, the focus and 
 epitome of the pestilence of the time. 
 
 And if it is ill to death in this wise, agreeing in its 
 several members upon no remedy, but spasmodic 
 toward all, and keeping to none for even successive 
 hours, what is the state of its patients all over the 
 world ? According to Government figures, one half 
 die, and the other half struggle back into life through 
 more or less difficult convalescence. Clearly then 
 there is no evidence that medicine plays any other 
 part than a destructive one in its relation to cholera, 
 or that it is any other than a violent indecent way of 
 disturbing inevitable death-beds, and doing worse 
 than nothing. 
 
 That such is the fact there can be no doubt. A 
 short consideration of the predisponents and chances 
 in cholera will convince us of it. Whenever cholera 
 is coming out, and patches of country or of city are 
 included in its spots, whatever weakens the human 
 organism, and lowers the tone and harmony of health, 
 predisposes the body to its reception. Some popula- 
 tions are at their weakest in summer heat, and then 
 cholera takes them : others are below the high level 
 of a sustained vitality in the long and stunting winter 
 snows, and then they belong to the cholera : bad 
 food, fear, sorrow, debauchery, sad early mornings 
 after uproarious nights, bad conscience, filth, malaria, 
 effluvia, — all these, and every conceivable depressant, 
 throws down its prey into the pits of cholera, and 
 makes recovery nearly hopeless. Aj^e, and when the 
 attack occurs, the fight for life is on the same field 
 
 13 2 
 
4 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 of natural chances. If artificial depressants in the 
 shape of drugs are poured into the system, the oppor- 
 tunities of life are still further contracted. Especially 
 is this the case with opium, brandy, and stimulants, 
 which, where they fail to relieve, superadd most rapid 
 exhaustion of their own : a fact well known to the 
 medical profession ; and this exhaustion occurs at a 
 time when every seed and grain of force is wanted 
 by life to conduct the struggle. Is it not then clear 
 that the statistics of cholera might be improved, by 
 simply leaving out the old medical profession ? 
 
 Sir, and my Countrymen ! they have a shrewd 
 suspicion of this themselves, and accordingly, to 
 their honor though not their glory, in all public con- 
 siderations and recommendations they have tended 
 very much to leave themselves out. The profession, 
 true to the malady which it has, to get rid of its 
 drugs, has betaken itself to the sewers. God forbid 
 that I should not honor the social office of the 
 scavenger, — from the adjutant birds of Calcutta to 
 the ediles of Rome, they are purveyors of a cleanli- 
 ness w^hich makes their adventitious diii; into dignity ; 
 but then hitherto they and the medical profession, 
 though communicants and friends, are something 
 apart. And no patient on his bed of sickness was 
 ever attended before by a professed scavenger, even 
 though Cincinnatus were the man. That time has 
 now, however, come ; and our cholera-doctors em- 
 ploy no treatment in which they confide, but the 
 treatment by draining. If cholera rages, call in the 
 whitewasher, call in the gully-hole trapper, call in the 
 drain-maker, call in the chloride of lime maker, the 
 butcher, baker, publican, and the rapid shell and 
 
THE DOCTORS DESERTING PHYSIC. 5 
 
 coffin maker^ — and let the scrap and remnant of the 
 office of the medical man be, to be the caller ! No 
 profession ever underwent a more sheer self-abroj]jation. 
 
 Don^t let me be misunderstood. Prevention is 
 better than cure ; and the arts of prevention are 
 noble arts. Is the medical profession^ then, to have 
 no arts of prevention? it has vaccination against 
 small pox ; what has it of the kind against cholera ? 
 The drainage prevention, the clothing and food pre- 
 vention, and the thousand scaffi)ldings that support 
 the great arising palace of human health, in the pre- 
 sence of disease, the unbuilder, are the contribution 
 of numerous other callings, and do not await the im- 
 pertinent call of any single profession. As the fire- 
 engines come by their own natural guides to a house 
 on fire, so do these necessities to the society which 
 wants them. But what we want from the medical 
 man is the medicine-prevention, and no irrelevant re- 
 commendation to the navigator, the plumber, or the 
 mason. Yet these parties, in cholera, are literally 
 the M.D. of which the doctors are the jog-trot 
 apothecary. That such a prevention exists, I shall 
 shew you in the sequel ; but the present point is, 
 that if the medical man knows nothing of any safe- 
 guard of the kind, he has quitted his post, to which 
 thenceforth others must be appointed. 
 
 Nursed and reared in and to the medical profes- 
 sion, there is a rapidly growing set of dissentients 
 called the Homoeopaths, who alone ofier to occupy 
 the place which the " infallible" profession has ceded. 
 Alive with faith born of experience, standing upon 
 the everlasting and everliving rock of facts, they know 
 that they have medical or healing powers equal to 
 
6 
 
 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 the emergency of pestilence, and are willing to put 
 them to tlic proof on fair terms of trial, such as Avill 
 secure their own independency of action so far as this 
 is necessary to a successful issue. They have printed 
 and published all this, and from their little housetop 
 have cried it aloud with all their might to all whom 
 it concerns ; but they have cried to stopped ears and 
 scornful faces. 
 
 Let me here make an extract from a paper on 
 cholera put forth by the British Homoeopathic Asso- 
 ciation, and which gives a few statistics in point, as 
 follows : — 
 
 TKEATED AT THEIR OWN HOUSES. 
 
 liesults of AUopathic or ordinary treat- 
 ment of Cholera. 
 
 Cases. Deaths. 
 At Tischnowitz, in Moravia 331 ... 102 
 „ Wishnev, Wototschok, 
 
 in Russia 199 ... 139 
 
 „ Mersebui-g 164 ...101 
 
 ,, Raab, in Hungary 1217 ... 578 
 
 In various Cavalry Regi- 
 ments in Great Britain 171 ... 54 
 „ the Troops at Gibraltar 459 ... 131 
 ,, the Troopsat Nova Scotia 
 
 and New Brunswick ... 210... 59 
 „ the Troops in Canada ... 356 ... 127 
 
 3107. ..1291 
 
 About one death in every 2 l-3rd cases, 
 or more than 39 per cent. 
 
 Besults of HomaopatJiic treatment of 
 Cholera. 
 
 Cases. Deatts. 
 
 By Dr. Baer, at Prague SO ... 
 
 „ Dr. Bakody, at Raab, in 
 
 Hungaiy 154... 6 
 
 „ Dr. Duplat, at Marseilles. 60 ... 12 
 „ Dr. Gerstel, at Tischuowitz, 
 
 in Moravia 327. ..32 
 
 „ Dr.Hauusch,atTischuowitz 84... 6 
 „ Dr. Kliener, at Saratof, in 
 
 Russia 183 ... 27 
 
 „ Dr. Jal, at Marseilles 19 ... 4 
 
 „ Dr. Lederer, at Vienna.... 80... 2 
 
 „ Dr. Lens, at Pesth 40... 8 
 
 „ Dr. Lichtenfels, at Vienna 44 ... 3 
 
 „ Dr. Lo\-y, at Prague 80 ... 8 
 
 „ Dr. Marenzeller, at Vienna 30... 3 
 
 „ Dr. Mayer, at Pesth Qo ... 
 
 „ Dr. Quin, at Tisclmowitz 
 
 and Paris 48... 3 
 
 „ Dr. Rumiuel, at Merseburg 46 ... 16 
 „ Dr. Schaller, at Prague ...113 ... 
 Dr. Schreter, at Lemberg 27 ... 1 
 
 Dr. Schultz, at Vienna . ... 17 
 Dr. Scider, atWislmey,Wo- 
 
 totsehok, iu Russia 109 
 
 Dr. Vrecka, at Vienna and 
 
 Slowitz 144 , 
 
 Dr. Veith, at Vienna 125 
 
 
 23 
 
 12 
 3 
 
 1875.. .169 
 
 About one death out of 11 cases, or 
 little more than 9 per Cent. 
 
 [It is proper to mention, that these results must not be received without cau- 
 tiou, on account of the variations in the intensity of the disorder at different 
 
HOMCEOPATHY SUCCEEDS. 
 
 places and periods. In a considerable degree, however, the Homoeopathic state- 
 ments are supported by testimonials and acknowledgments from local autho- 
 rities.] 
 
 TREATED IN HOSPITALS. 
 
 Cases. Deaths. 
 In the Drummond St. Cholera 
 Hospital, Edinbm-gh... 461 
 „ the Cholera Hospital, 
 
 Berlin, under Dr. Bohr 97 
 „ Knmkenburgs wards, at 
 
 Halle 104 
 
 „ Hamburg Hospitals, Oct. 
 
 and Nov. 1831 283 
 
 „ the Cholera Hospital, St. 
 Petersburgh, by Dr. Lich- 
 
 tenstadt 636 
 
 „ the Hospital, Raab 284 
 
 „ the Hospital, Bordeaux . 104 
 
 291 
 . 64 
 , 53 
 
 178 
 
 317 
 
 122 
 
 72 
 
 1969... 1097 
 
 About one death in 1 4-5th cases, or 
 about 56 per cent. 
 
 Cases. Deaths. 
 By Dr. Fleischmann, at 
 
 Vienna 732 ... 244 
 
 „ Drs. Havnel and Stiller, 
 
 at Berlin 32... 6 
 
 „ Dr. Mabit, at Bordeaux 31 ... 6 
 
 795 ... 258 
 
 About one death in 3 1-1 Otb cases, or 
 between 32 and 33 per cent. 
 
 " From the above it will be seen that in private treat- 
 ment the deaths under the Allopathic or ordinary method, 
 were 39 per cent., and under the Homoeopathic, little more 
 than 9 per cent. ; and that in hospitals it was 56 per cent, 
 under Allopathy, against 32 or 33 per cent, under Homoe- 
 opathy ; an astounding difference in the first description 
 of cases, and a very remarkable difference also in the 
 latter, although it is to be borne in mind that patients are 
 only brought to an hospital when they shew undoubted 
 evidence of the fully developed disease, many after having 
 been subject to a very violent treatment, and having been 
 dosed with Allopathic medicines, and many, of course, 
 are brought in a dying state.* 
 
 * " The Report of carefully authenticated cholera cases treated by 
 the medical officers of the Edinburgh Homoeopathic Dispensary, from 
 the 4th October, 1848, to the 1st February, 1849, received since the 
 first publication of this Circular, gives the foUovvdng results : — 
 
 Cases. Cured. Deaths. Under treatment. 
 
 236 179 57 none. 
 
 Proportion of deaths to cures, as one to three. 
 " The Return of the General Board of Health of the total number of 
 
8 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 " In Wilde's Austria^ its Literary^ Scientific^ and Medical 
 Institutiojisj it is remarked — ' Upon comparing the report 
 made of the treatment of cholera in the Homoeopathic 
 Hospital at Vienna, with that of the same epidemic in 
 other hospitals of Vienna at a similar time, it appeared 
 that while two-thirds of those treated by Dr. Fleischraann 
 recovered, two-thirds of those treated by the ordinary 
 methods in the other hospitals died. This very extraor- 
 dinary result led Count Kolowrat (Minister of the Interior) 
 to repeal the law relative to the practice of Homoeopathy.' 
 The hospital in question, it should be added, was daily 
 visited by two Allopathic inspecting phj^sicians, appointed 
 by the government. Dr. Roth, of Munich, also, who was 
 sent by the Bavarian government to observe the cholera 
 in different localities, and report on the effects of its Ho- 
 moeopathic treatment, published in 1833 an interesting 
 pamphlet, which has furnished a considerable portion of 
 the statistics above detailed. The statistics from Tischno- 
 witz, in Moravia, were furnished by the authorities of 
 that place, accompanied by a letter of the most grateful 
 acknowledgment. Dr. Veith, one of the practitioners 
 whose results are quoted in the above list, had formerly 
 been a medical practitioner in the Allopathic school, but 
 was at the time when the cholera raged at Vienna, Chap- 
 lain to the Court and to St. Stephen's Cathedral, and 
 
 cases treated at Edinburgh and Leith during the same period, is as 
 follows : — 
 
 Cases. Cured. Deaths. Under treatment 
 
 876 271 546 59 
 
 Proportion of deaths to cures, as two to one. 
 Or, supposing the cases treated Homoeopathically, and which were duly 
 reported to the authorities, to have been included in the General Re- 
 turn, — their deductions would shew a proportion of deaths to cui'es of 
 five to one under Allopathic treatment. 
 
 f This is the work of an Allopathic surgeon, the talented editor of 
 the Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medicine. 
 
HOMOEOPATHY SUCCEEDS. 
 
 whilst administering the consolations of religion to those 
 infected with cholera, he was shocked at the awful mor- 
 tality that prevailed ; and the idea of treating them ac- 
 cording to the Homoeopathic system, with which he was 
 already familiar, occurred to him. His success was so 
 great, that of 125 patients he lost but three." 
 
 It would be easy to add to the above lists similar 
 results from all the great towns of Europe and Ame- 
 rica during the late invasions of cholera ; but as one 
 of the most certain and accessible, I commend you 
 to the recent pamphlet by Dr. Charge of Marseilles, 
 in which that physician shews the marked success, 
 both for prevention and cure, which has attended the 
 Homoeopathic means. In India also an amateur (see 
 The British Journal of Homoeopathy^ J^y^ 1854), 
 has treated 629 cases of cholera, and accompanies 
 his results with admirable statistics : the gross ratio 
 of deaths being 30 per cent. The same good results 
 have attended Homoeopathic treatment in these past 
 weeks in the Homoeopathic Hospital in Golden 
 Square; and also in the recent terrible attack of the 
 pestilence at Barbadoes in the West Indies. 
 
 One would have thought that facts like these, not 
 alas marvellous in themselves, yet marvellously good 
 in contrast with the deadly zero of the doctors, would 
 have arrested the attention, and provoked the trial, 
 of all professors of the art of healing. One would 
 have thought that they would have deserted their old 
 bog of failures, and tried the dry land to which Ho- 
 moeopathy invites them on every side. On the con- 
 trary, on they go from unsurety to unsurety, expe- 
 rimenting in the same fruitless direction, and sedu- 
 lously avoiding every path that professes to lead awaj' 
 
 b3 
 
10 TUE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 from their misuccess. For this they have many pre- 
 texts. First, they deny all facts out of their own 
 pale. Next, they deny in specie that the cases treated 
 ■were cholera ; simply because the average of deaths 
 was diflcrent from their own. This is a very com- 
 mon dodge. They find that diseases under their plan 
 have a certain mortality, and a certain duration ; and 
 this rate of death and time they consider to be the 
 law of nature, and not the condition of their own 
 impuissance. Thus I have again and again found 
 that cases of hooping-cough cut short, were straight- 
 way pronounced to be not hooping-cough, because 
 under Homoeopathy they had not lasted six months — 
 the proper Allopathic duration. So inflammation of 
 the lungs was not rightly diagnosed — was not in- 
 flammation, because aconite and bryonia infinitesimals 
 had cm'ed it ; whereas the orthodox had barely cured 
 a proportion of such cases by bleeding and mercury 
 enough to kill. So that they have a ready way of 
 limiting what can be done in disease to precisely what 
 they can do. A very pretty teachableness for a pro- 
 gressive art. It reminds me of a man I met in Paris 
 this autumn, to whom I told that I had gone to Bor- 
 deaux in a day of thirteen hours. He said it could 
 not be Bordeaux — that I was mistaken. I stared. 
 He told me that he had travelled hard a whole day 
 from Paris to Orleans, which was a town about a 
 fifth of the distance, and I must be mistaking Bor- 
 deaux for Orleans. Finding that he was a mystic, 
 with his eyes open only into his own head, and not 
 outwards, I mystified him still further by telling him 
 that I had gone in a travelling town drawn by a huge 
 tea-kettle with a coal-scuttle for my two horses. 
 
FATAL DECREES. 11 
 
 And now he declared that I was mad. 1 found how- 
 ever reason to pity him : he was an old diligence 
 proprietor who had lost his all by not being sharp in 
 selling off his stock of lumber and horses when the rail- 
 road was coming : his ideas were fossils ; and he had 
 crazed into a man who had lost the power of noting 
 the ways of locomotives. So, methought, the medical 
 profession is even like that old diligence proprietor. 
 Hooping-cough ought to last six months — if alleged 
 to be cured in less it is not hooping-cough ! Typhus 
 ought to last six weeks — otherwise it is not typhus ! 
 Pneumonia should be killed or cured by bleeding, 
 blistering, calomel, &c., — if it be cured by Homoeo- 
 pathy it is not pneumonia ! This is at all events 
 a new form of diagnosis ; and if properly applied to 
 cholera will annul all facts but those of the existing 
 Allopathic mortality. The question is, will the people 
 of Great Britain allow the hideous result to be fixed 
 as the perpetual condition of disease ; or will it call 
 in other healers ? 
 
 Believe me. Sir, and my Countrymen, I should not 
 now be boring your ears with either complaints or 
 suggestions, if I could find any way to the audience 
 chamber of this old medical profession with its mad 
 conservatism. But there is no getting at it. Enscon- 
 ced in its institutions, wrapped around with all their 
 fur, and fed with all their fatness, it is a little Russia, 
 or a little China in the heart and centre of our 
 dominions. Every grand battle it loses is reported 
 to it as a victory by its prime ministers, The TimeSj 
 The Lancet, and The Athenceum : its disgraces are the 
 occasions on which it distributes stars and garters 
 from its seat of honor; if the Homoeopaths come 
 
12 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 with an embassy to any of its outer gates, it pro- 
 claims in characters of crooked fists, "exterminate 
 the barbarians, and let them be exterminated : away 
 with the foreign devils." Nor does there appear to 
 be anything but public opinion collaring and deposing 
 it, that will bring their great Fee Fo Fum to the 
 knowledge conveyed by the natural senses. 
 
 Its mighty General, Whang Hum, commonly 
 known as TJie Times, standing Lord High Commis- 
 sioner to all orthodoxy which wishes to be hoaxed, 
 laced Beadle of Fogydom, is bamboozled by it, and 
 bamboozles it, as is the usual ease w^ith despots and 
 their tools. Lately T endeavoured to be admitted to 
 the presence of this big personage, but without the 
 least success. I had carefully watched The Times to 
 see whether or no it would, in the interest of the 
 British Nation, give Homoeopathy a fair hearing 
 when cholera was in our houses. Day after day it 
 was full of letters about the pestilence, in which 
 drainage, chloride of lime, and above all, castor oil, 
 to which The Times is wedded, were freely admitted 
 to occupy columns of the leading journal. One day, 
 after the editors had been in the sewers and kennels 
 for many weeks, stirring them up, — as I should have 
 thought at rather an inconvenient time, — they, the 
 editors, suddenly proclaimed that they had a sense of 
 cleanliness, — moral cleanness — of the most delightful 
 description, from the fact that in their public station, 
 as moulding the opinions of millions, they had done 
 their thorough duty, had given everything which 
 offered a chance of healing, fair play, and were ever 
 ready to lend the breadth of that sacred trust, their 
 publicity, to every attempt however humble to alle- 
 
MORAL FRAGRANCE OF THE TIMES. 13 
 
 viate the dispensations of heaven^ or to correct the 
 pollutions of man. It seemed to me then as if the 
 wedding guest had not on the wedding garment : as 
 if the blanched skirts of The Times were not white 
 with the light of innocence, but with the whitewash 
 of a very rash presumption. About that very day, a 
 long letter upon the Fungoid Theory of cholera ap- 
 peared in the journal, in which all that was mouldy 
 was put in the large type of a leading article, and as 
 sulphur kills fungi, it was recommended, though not 
 very clearly how, to be applied to the roots of the 
 matter. Now, thought I, TJie Times has got its 
 occupation, to wander about dirty places with a brim- 
 stone dredging box, and pepper fungi, — The Times, 
 the yellow powdered gentleman^s gentleman, the 
 Jeames of the medical clubs, — TJie Times in brim- 
 stone plush at last ! Finding it honest so far, yet 
 quite oblique with regard to having done its duty — 
 its two eyes, like a Chinaman^ s, where its ears ought 
 to be, with regard to all moral unity — I determined 
 to write to it, and ask it about Homoeopathy. 
 " Cain," whispered I, " where is thy brother ?" I 
 wrote it the substance of this very paper which you 
 are now reading, but would you believe it, though 
 the mould and the mildew, and the fine flowers of 
 sulphur, had been in its largest print — second only 
 to its '' decisive intelligence" of the fall of Sebastopol, 
 — my facts and cm'cs, and treatment, by Homoeo- 
 pathy did not appear in print at all ! I had been led 
 to anticipate as much. Of course many letters had 
 been cushioned before mine. And then I was told, 
 but sense and duty would not let me off the trouble 
 of writing on that account, that T]ie Times was dead- 
 
li< THE MINISTRY OF UEALTII. 
 
 set against Homoeopathy, that they had a medical 
 censor "who threw out that article at all hazards : and 
 somehow or other it has proved that the result is 
 even so. I wonder at it ; yet I see The Times too 
 well not to know that it shall one day advocate 
 Homoeopathy, with all its joint stock trumpets, and 
 all its tardy thunders. On this, as on every other 
 great fact of the age, it will only be a few days after 
 the fair. 
 
 Sir, and my Countrymen ! is not the moral of all 
 this, strange, old, and edifying ? Here is a grand per- 
 plexity of horrors, deaths by thousands and tens of 
 thousands in our cities, our villages, our fleets, and 
 our armies ; the doctors at their wits' end, with all 
 their resources quite broken, — of most approved bad- 
 ness ; the population, the medical profession, and the 
 journals, rushing about in panic-terror for something, 
 anything, to stay the mischief; some looking into 
 the air with microscopes after floating fungi and imps 
 to be peppered, and have Times sulphur put upon 
 theii' tails; some with wild uplifted faces imploring 
 Hercules Chadwick to wash, flush, drain, and fume 
 away the destroyer; some convulsively grasping at 
 castor oil, and with angry convulsiveness throwing 
 it away again : some in. prayer, and all in despair : 
 and yet the terror-stricken crowd will not for one 
 moment look at the very only thing that pretends to 
 be somewhat of a sheet-anchor, that has been proved 
 to be such in all lands under these fearful inflictions. 
 Let us try all things in heaven and earth, and in the 
 waters under the earth, all things in sulphur and the 
 pit of Orcus also — all things but Homoeopathy. 
 This is just the case with every sinful state. The 
 
MUST, CRUMPLED UP. 15 
 
 sinner is perfectly ready to cede everything but his 
 own fortress, his own nonsense, his own sin. The 
 drunkard will regulate his diet to a nicety, wear his 
 flannels by the best orders, breathe the purest air, go 
 to bed in the best time, and to church also ; but he 
 must have his drops : the damning facts he ought to 
 listen to, the weight of common sense against them, 
 oppress his senses, and choke his bad life, and he will 
 not hear them. And so it is with the opposition to 
 all truths that exact a central reform, and threaten 
 the evil heart of a system. " Anything you please, 
 gentlemen," saith The Times, "but such truths. 
 Away with them, away with Homoeopathy." 
 
 Pretexts of course are easily raised to shew how 
 right and proper it is to blink the convincing facts in 
 favor of Homoeopathy, and to decide against it be- 
 cause it is at first sight improbable. They say that 
 the principle of giving medicines that have the power 
 of causing a disease similar to that to be cured, must 
 (though it does not) make people worse of their exist- 
 ing malady. Must is a mighty fellow, but often 
 easily "crumpled up" by unceremonious practice. 
 Experience is the prover and enlarger of all things, 
 and possibilities and impossibilities are not body at 
 all, but the last hairs on the tails of facts, following in 
 the rear with the most dead obedience, and occupying 
 in wisdom the hinder most place of all. The allega- 
 tion of the impossibility of Homoeopathy is then in 
 every physical sense a kind of madness, and may be 
 dismissed as such, and now let us attend to a second 
 pretext, that the Homoeopathic means are "inade- 
 quate." The argument runs thus : Here is Mr. So 
 and So, most near and dear to me, attacked by cho- 
 
IG THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 Icra : can I trust him to infinitesimal doses, which 
 seem quite like doing nothing. The circumstances 
 are terrible : the means of assistance look small in- 
 deed. First, how run the facts ? The old way of 
 treatment, whose means looking formidably great, 
 consisting of huge stores of drugs, many of them 
 capable of producing instant effects of poison and 
 death, unmistakeable signs of a certain power, loses 
 professedly, as to day^s Times states, (October 4th,) 
 Q>^ out of 100 cholera cases. If tliis treatment, bulky 
 and potential, be not inadequate, what is ? I have 
 already shewn you that medicine here does not do 
 nothing, only because it does mischief. The Homoeo- 
 pathic treatment cures 70 out of the 100, or a larger 
 proportion. Here the inadequacy is far less. Let me 
 recall to you that power and violence are diflPerent 
 things, but that violence and weakness are, for good 
 ends, generally the same. ^Tis so in other things, 
 whj" not in physic ? Medicine comes from medeo, the 
 verb, I heal ; and no drug which is not healing in its 
 application, is in those hands a medicine at all, much 
 less a powerful medicine. Moreover the dimensions 
 of power are not weighed by scales, or told off on 
 graduated bottles; but reckoned by deeds done. 
 When I am called to an inflammation, I know that 
 aconite and belladonna in billionths of a drop are a 
 vast healing power, because I have cured, and daily 
 do cure, formidable inflammations in their onset by 
 these means. I look upon my little bottles as giants ; 
 as words that shake great diseases to their marrows, 
 and into their ashes ; and rid the whole man of a foe 
 life-size. Away then with the bigness based on 
 quantity, and which sits like a \'ulgar bully in the 
 
GREAT ACQUAINTANCES. 17 
 
 medical sliops : great cures determine the only great- 
 ness which sick men^ or their guardians, can recognize 
 in medicine. I dismiss this, of inadequacy, as being 
 but a reflection of the confusion of those with whom 
 inadequacy is the everlasting luck. 
 
 A third count in the medical brief against Homoe- 
 opathy remains to be noticed ; the allegation that its 
 known success is due to Nature, and that it might 
 profitably go even farther, and instead of giving in- 
 finitesimals give clean nothing. It is remarkable that 
 all these charges are true of the accuser — true of the 
 old system of medicine. It would be better that it 
 should do nothing, than fill the human constitution 
 with poisons. But its recommendation to Nature is, 
 to say the least, very suspicious. Like some doubtful 
 character boasting of his acquaintance with lords and 
 ladies at a great distance, and interspersing ^' My 
 friend, the Duke " in his stories, the doctors talking, 
 as they do, of that Dame, cause us to enquire how 
 and when they have been honored with her famili- 
 arity. She is abroad in all w^eathers, mixing with the 
 commonest people, and most conversible ; yet I have 
 never heard of the doctors being with her. They 
 have, it is true, dressed up a hat and feathers, and 
 some old skirts reputed to have been hers, got sur- 
 reptitiously from her butler, stuck them on a pole of 
 their own, and called them vis medicatrix natures; 
 and this Guy they have leeched, blistered, bled and 
 calomelized in a manner that shewed at once that 
 they thought they w^ere playing with a bowelless cos- 
 tume : but this is the very nearest they have come 
 to nature so far as my knowledge goes. The Dame 
 herself has ordered them from her sight from the 
 
18 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 begiuning. Eyes, cars, nose, mouth, — all her lofty 
 and all her lowly featiu'es, each fibre of her self- 
 sustaining and universal frame, abhors, repudiates 
 and outspews their druggeries and violations, and 
 names them swindlers when they claim her friend- 
 ship. Yet, perhaps, by her they mean somebody 
 else ! 
 
 I fell on this saving thought in reading in a book 
 by Mr. Trench, on the significance of words. He 
 finds that words gradually change their meaning ac- 
 cording to the moral state of the users. Now, 
 thought I, (j)vaL<; is the Greek for nature ; hence 
 our word, physics, meaning the sciences versed about 
 our world ; hence comes physic, the science of me- 
 dicine ; a part of knowledge, a kingly part, put by 
 metaphor for tiie whole : the science of man's physical 
 restoration to the harmonies of things and the music 
 of the spheres. And then in our day, hence comes 
 physic, or three calomel pills and a black draught : 
 w^hich last physic, or di'astic purges, are no doubt 
 the phusis — the natm'e, which the doctors do know. 
 Where they have met her is no longer a mystery, 
 but patent, — "portable and patent." Well, their 
 honesty is saved at the expense of their dignity. We 
 now see through it' all as from a tower : Morrison's 
 pills are their universe, the globe to which they gra- 
 \itate, and physicking is their goddess. But then 
 how does this square with doing nothing? Incon- 
 sistency, let me remark, is a part of many inexact 
 people, and sometimes saves a character : let it now 
 save that of medical science. 
 
 For nobody can mean that in doing vulgar nothing 
 they are near nature, who, furnished forth by her 
 
THE EXPECTANT SCHOOL EXPECTING. 19 
 
 Maker, does nearly everything that is done. AVere 
 the perfection of medicine to lie in doing nothing, it 
 would be out of the sisterhood of the arts, whose 
 busy fingers strive to emulate the light in its passage 
 and the heat in its infinite throb, and worthily to sit, 
 earning the moments, on the top-stools of industry 
 in the shining factory of the smi and the planets. 
 The doctors cannot therefore intend to say, that the 
 aim of physic is to do nothing. There is though a 
 class who go rather near this conclusion, and as it 
 were shave nothing very closely. There is the ex- 
 pectant school : the people who wait to see what will 
 turn up in disease; who note agonies and sketch 
 them, and see when they get better, and when they 
 grow worse : fine students of the natural laws, ascer- 
 taining for philosophical transactions the natural 
 duration of fever, whooping-cough, and pneumonia ; 
 just as expectant agriculturists, sometimes called 
 savages, watch bogs and morasses to see how long 
 they will last in the course of things, and when 
 heaven will drain them, and sow them for wa\ing 
 sheets of corn. These doctors belong to a tract of 
 physic recently mapped down : they are in a state of 
 natm*e, and may be called the aborigines of disease. 
 I believe they will easily move off farther west, as 
 they have no hold on the soil : like the Chocktaws 
 and the Chippeways they will sell the land which 
 they do not value for a few gewgaws. Their women, 
 sisters of charity, as all women naturally are, will 
 be left behind them, and will constitute a good 
 school of nurses, developing the grand art of nursing 
 on account of the very defect, or annulment, of the 
 medical or higher art. So that our expectants or 
 
:20 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 savages will not pass out of the world without a rem- 
 nant being saved, or good aecruing. The lluler of 
 things brings this out of their laziness. The as- 
 siduity of the nurses compensates for the flight of the 
 physicians. This is a second example of the deser- 
 tion of medicine which we before chronicled^ when 
 we noticed that public health had come entirely to 
 be a question of draining, and other non- medical 
 preventive means. 
 
 You all of you remember the story of the lawyer 
 who conducted the case of a man who had borrowed 
 some useful article from a neighbor^ kept it an un- 
 conscionable time, and then returned it broken. 
 There were three defences made. First, it was 
 pleaded that the article had never been borrowed : 
 second, that it was whole when sent back ; and 
 thii'd, that it was cracked at the time it was lent. 
 The charges against Homoeopathy are much of this 
 cross tissue. First, the Allopaths demonstrate that 
 nothing at all is done ; next, that the effects demand 
 the special interposition of Nature ; and now, third, 
 we have to register, that the great agent in produc- 
 ing them is imagination and fancy, which are usually 
 regarded as powers the most alien from nature's 
 steady ways. I don't hold with the imagination and 
 fancy theory altogether, because sucking babies just 
 born, and also horses, exhibit the rapidly curative 
 effects of Homoeopathy not less than Christians of 
 matimty. And babies and horses, though undoubt- 
 edly they have imagination, and are fanciful enough, 
 yet do not imagine in the direction of cure : which 
 is what the AUopathists want for their hypothesis. 
 That the case is so with infants, I aver on my own 
 
allopathy's complaints. 21 
 
 experience, and that of hnndreds of my brethren. 
 But perhaps they imbibe the imagining potency 
 through the mother's credulous milk ; and as perhaps 
 they do, and heartily do I wish that all mothers were 
 credent of Homoeopathy, I will give the sucklings up, 
 and assert the same fact of babes a fair time after 
 weaning, and before they have come to imagine 
 medicinal effects. Neither here, nor with horses (for. 
 Sir, and my Countrymen, we have Homoeopathic 
 veterinarians also, in large practices), do I think 
 that Allopathic subtlety can underdig me. Well, 
 but there is something important which I cheerily 
 admit in this imaginative resort. And I deem that 
 it is a feather in the Homoeopathic cap, that its oppo- 
 nents charge us with ha^dng possession of the ima- 
 gination of our public : just as it is the sure sign of 
 the extreme downfal of our adversaries, that the ima- 
 gination of the sick, which is commonly known as 
 confidence, has entirely deserted them. A doctor 
 who has no power over the minds of his patients, is 
 very near the street-door of every house of them. 
 Cures, Sir, and my Countrymen, are the things that 
 stir the public imagination, and cause sufferers of all 
 kinds to cast their slimy coils of despair, and to feel 
 new hope and new life already in approaching the 
 threshold of the man of health. Cures by Homoeo- 
 pathy have created the imagination of which the 
 AUopathists complain ; and continuous cures, year 
 by year, sustain and enlarge it. 'Tis a thoroughly 
 solid faculty, and is no other than the vivacious eye 
 of experience directing those whose vision is but dim 
 as yet from the films of disease, to point their suffer- 
 ing faces upwards to the azure lands of hope. This 
 
22 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 imagination, by the wonderful eonnexion of the mind 
 ■with the body, is not only the prophet, but in part 
 the realization, of a new-born health. There is not 
 a single successful calling on earth that lives an hour 
 ■^-ithout its own department of this great imagina- 
 tion ; and when the doctors accuse the Homoeopaths 
 of having it, they only shew that they themselves 
 are out of the circle of live arts and sciences, and 
 active citizens, altogether. 
 
 I will also go further in admission, because I love 
 to give way to our foes ; and now I grant that the 
 impalpable doses lend themselves to imagination better 
 than grosser quantities. I canH help it, — 'tis an un- 
 doubted law of nature. If you can see too much, 
 the mind has less suggestion-room. I note a few 
 perfectly sweet globules labelled aconite, and having 
 had previous good reason to know them benign, my 
 fancy has full range over the potent spirit that may 
 or must be enshrined in their little cenfectionary 
 universes. On the other hand, I stumble across a 
 bottle of salts and senna ; the filthy smell, the nau- 
 seous taste, the nasty look are so strong and invasive, 
 that I have no mind to think about them ; they do 
 not converse with my brains, but with my insulted 
 eves, nose and mouth : I know thev can do me no 
 good; and my imagination will guard my gullet 
 against their mischiefs. Thus it is that Allopathy is 
 an extinguisher to all healing fancies. I admire its 
 impudence in parading its own want of charms as a 
 reason why the public should continue in love with 
 it : as though one's chare-goody should reproach one's 
 Dulcinea with her magic, her beauty, and her sweetness. 
 
 Well but there is another quite difi'erent accusation 
 
THE HORRORS OF DECILLIONTHS. 23 
 
 against us, that instead of doing nothing, or handling 
 only fancy^ or being the sport of nature, we make 
 use of the strongest poisons known, and are most 
 dangerous druggists. I am afraid this is not honest. 
 For the most part we use the same substances as our 
 Allopaths, though on a different principle, and in 
 different doses. Arsenic, mercury, prussic acid, nux 
 vomica, are common to both schools; but we give 
 them in doses ranging from the ten-thousandth to the 
 decillionth of a grain, where the old school adminis- 
 ters them in considerable quantities. I challenge them 
 to bring forward one substance in nature which will 
 produce any poisonous effects given by the mouth in 
 ten-thousandths of a grain; which are about our 
 largest doses. The case is the same with regard to 
 our animal poisons, which are utterly harmless as we 
 give them, and most valuable healers. Cobra poison 
 and magnesia are equally innoxious in our way of 
 appliance : the lion lies down with the lamb in the 
 new city of health. This accusation, however, I 
 opine, is meant for patients, not for medical ears : 
 they know it is a gross untruth. Indeed, I have had 
 experience of as much. In one notable case that 
 was about to be transferred to my care, a great mad 
 doctor, who possessed the patient and would retain 
 her, told the husband that Homoeopathy was all flam, 
 while he told the poor susceptible wife, that if ever 
 she placed herself under it, the drugs would destroy 
 her brain entirely. I would not judge him harshly : 
 but thought he was on the road to the same place 
 with the lawyer who had the three clever counts to 
 excuse his client for the broken utensil. 
 
 Before quitting this interesting thesis, the imagi- 
 
24 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 nation, I will discurse so far as to aver that the ^vhole 
 class of fanciful patients are just those who are the 
 most difficult to act upon with Homoeopathic medi- 
 cines. There is indeed a broad distinction between 
 the imaginative and fanciful classes. The former are 
 no doubt liable to permanent impressions which may 
 run on into fixed ideas that set medicinal action at 
 nought, because they set up powerful actions of their 
 own, not dissimilar in their ultimate form to the 
 vibrations produced in the frame by dynamic medi- 
 cines. But with the fanciful, who by those ignorant 
 of Homoeopathy are often said to be subjects just 
 adapted to its influence, there is such a constant in- 
 terference on the part of the restless and quick mind 
 with the organization, that not only are the efiFects 
 of medicines cancelled, but it is difficult to command 
 the capricious patient long enough to work with 
 steadiness towards cure. They are one of our greatest 
 difficulties. Not so however when any acute and 
 serious disease assails them; then, by the law of 
 nature, which does not readily tolerate two great 
 centres of actinty in the body at once, the power of 
 fancy is drained of its vigour, and the real malady 
 comes on the scene in its physical predominance. In 
 this case such patients are as readily treated and 
 cured as other persons. I experience this every day, 
 and note in it a convincing proof that in Homoeopathy 
 we have a physical force which is especially adequate 
 to real diseases. You have only to find out truly 
 what is the matter, and to treat the mischief skilfully, 
 and the bodily superaddition to the patient's ordinary 
 maladies gives way. Morbid fancy however comes 
 again on the scene afterwards. 
 
ALLOPATHY ENVIES FANCY. 25 
 
 Bear in mind then that in fact those in whom 
 imagination and fancy as related to bodily states are 
 predominant, are so far less adapted to Homoeopathic 
 treatment than other people ; precisely because they 
 drug themselves with their own ideas and fancies. 
 And note how little the old school attends to Psy- 
 chology and mental treatment, when they put forth 
 that morbid mind affords facilities to any method of 
 cure. 
 
 But then they say sometimes that our successes 
 are the work of diet alone. For my part I can only 
 say that I am very little strict in this matter of diet, 
 excepting that I insist upon certain regulations of 
 common sense, in which men of all schools would 
 agree with me. In chronic cases, coffee and spices 
 and green tea are nearly all I interdict : otherwise I 
 believe chiefly in variety, and allow temperance the 
 run of the kitchen and the cellar. In acute cases, 
 fevers and inflammations, the patient^s instincts gene- 
 rally diet him sufficiently; he longs for water and 
 diluents; and these are allowed by everybody. In 
 diet then there is very little difference between us 
 and the old practitioners ; and the corollary is that 
 our superior success is due solely to the superiority 
 of the Homoeopathic medicines. 
 
 But, Sir and my Countrymen, I see it strikes you 
 that all these hypotheses framed by our adversaries, 
 and knocked down by the most casual bowls of facts, 
 are a cumulative evidence that in our practice there 
 is something extraordinary to be accounted for ; that 
 we do cure most provokingly. You are quite right ; 
 and I have no doubt that in place of the dozen ex- 
 ploded reasons brought forward; you now cheerfully 
 
 c 
 
26 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 accept our artless explanation ; that ^yc have indeed 
 a principle of a new kind to work from, an art that 
 carries it out, a current faith and courage such as 
 nothing else creates ; and a success and an applause 
 from an ever-widening public, that edifies and excites 
 us to continual exertion of thought and study in the 
 delightful path of the healing profession. 
 
 Instead then of admitting that we manipulate our 
 patients by illegitimate handles of imagination and 
 fancy, I beg to assure you that we simply make fair 
 use of the confidence acquired to us by previous acts 
 of cure, and by this means steady and support the 
 sick through the long days and nights of their dis- 
 eases. And let me also add, that answering to their 
 confidence, we have ourselves a lively faith procured 
 by experience of success, a faith which exerts a heal- 
 ing strength in the chamber of weakness and pain. 
 Homoeopathy has done a marvel in giving this faith 
 to its medical sons ; had it no other claim than that 
 of reviving the expiring belief of the medical pro- 
 fession in active means, it would already have vast 
 merits. We all know how current the notion has 
 become, that the doctors are sceptics in their own 
 art, and the best praise which they seem to seek now 
 with the light and criticism of Homoeopathy burning 
 and shining around them, is that they give very little 
 medicine. The most advanced among them do not 
 doubt the brute power, but the good of their drugs. 
 This is indeed no positive approach to Homoeopathy, 
 which is a definite principle and a manifold art, ex- 
 cepting in the sense that the ground and table of a 
 razed city is a chance for a new city to be built there -, 
 but it is perhaps a needful stage of disbelief for de- 
 
ALLOPATHY TROUBLES CONSCIENCE. 27 
 
 stroying that which is meant to pass away. But in 
 the meantime what a blessing is Homoeopathy to those 
 who receive it_, and find in it a medical faith and hope 
 which justifies them in their presence beside the suf- 
 fering and the sick. I can only say^ Sir^ and my 
 Countrymen^ that before I knew Homoeopathy I was 
 in daily moral perplexity at the bedside ; experience 
 had taught me that in many cases I was of more 
 than doubtful benefit : my honesty, without being 
 struck down_, was troubled in very conscience at the 
 means I employed, and which (though justified by 
 secundum artem, and statistics of secundum necemjy 
 yet were both barbarous and questionable, added fresh 
 stings to disease, took away nature^s chance, accele- 
 rated decay, and perturbed the last hours of this 
 mortal life. There was in them such a horrid war 
 with the sad dignity proper to death-beds, with the 
 repose of sick men, with the sweet pity of relatives 
 and the commiseration of attendants, with all soft 
 dealing, with eveiy principle of cleanliness and sweet- 
 ness, that I could not but feel like a disturber and a 
 -sdolent man in recommending and superintending 
 them on many a well-remembered occasion. Often- 
 times I would gladly not have been called in under 
 such circumstances ; for though I was not fully con- 
 scious of the fact, I now know, alive as I am and 
 renewed by faith in Homoeopathy, that I did not 
 believe in the idedical art. What a load, what a 
 moral load is removed from me now ; what a delight 
 there is in medical practice ; what countercheers from 
 my own heart answering the cheer of uninjured con- 
 valescents. And where I cannot cure, and cannot 
 retard decease, I have done no mischief, and intro- 
 
 c 3 
 
28 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 duccd no unseemliness^ and for the rest I feel that I 
 am embarked in an ever advancing art and science, 
 and that future years, and my more loving and living 
 Homoeopathic successors, will yet "svin vast waste 
 lands from the domain of the now incurable, and 
 plant the fences of health and vigor in a realm 
 of constitutions which lie as yet beyond my feeble 
 powers. 
 
 Each man. Sir, and my Countrymen, as he ^Tites 
 his little book, or says his little say, takes the color 
 of his times, and gains that metaphorical element 
 that lies on every word, from the hues of the public 
 life with which he is surrounded. Let them then 
 say now, that it is the above living faith in medicine, 
 come down to us renewed by Homoeopathy, that makes 
 its small resolved band not only courageous at the 
 bedside, but full of joy in the presence of the vast 
 extended lines of the medical foe : servants of a 
 truth that makes us free, the handful of us is more 
 than a match for the myriad serfs of routine and 
 dogma, led on by the old Nicholas, Prejudice. Quan- 
 tity in drugs fails to cure sickness, and quantity in 
 doctors will be no more successful, though in solid- 
 looking squares of infantry of Apothecaries and light 
 cavalry of physicians, in rescuing the old medical 
 profession. The bayonet point, which is the exigency 
 of the public service and the sharpness of facts, shall 
 disperse the serf-masses, and leave us victors on the 
 field. 
 
 I must stiU further notice to you another dodge of 
 those who dream against Homoeopathy ; the common 
 saw, that it is all very well in clironic diseases, but 
 inapplicable to emergencies and acute cases. The 
 
HOMCEOPATHY TACKLES ACUTE DISEASES. 29 
 
 first sure thing is^ that it is applicable to acute cases, 
 and cures them with marvellous rapidity : to this I 
 can make affidavit from daily deeds : there is a posi- 
 tive pleasure in the velocity and certainty of such 
 cures under simple circumstances of inflammation, 
 and of course where the disease does not fall upon 
 the soil of a bad or broken down constitution. Where 
 the latter is the case, Homceopathy too will do more 
 than anything else. My assertion is borne out by 
 hundreds of practitioners in all parts of these islands, 
 of the British possessions, and of the civilized world ; 
 from the Himalayas to New Orleans, cholera and 
 yellow fever, and other kindred fiends, cower, crouch, 
 and run away before the Homoeopathic rifles : the ex- 
 perience of these practitioners is duly registered, and 
 may be easily read ; they use no other drugs but the 
 Homoeopathic means, with of course an abundant 
 realm of hygienic resources also, fine dieting, skilful 
 cold water, cheery words, real hopeful faces not stereo- 
 typed smiles, mesmerism and the rest : and these 
 practitioners have an abundant clientry, who are not 
 used to run away from them to the violent ineffica- 
 cious people, whenever disease is sharp and sudden. 
 Moreover, these Homoeopaths are the only evidence 
 proff'ered in the case ; for their opponents have made 
 no experiments of their means, have no skill in 
 making such, and are consequently out of court. 
 All the testimony then is on one side, in. favor of 
 Homoeopathy ; and on the other there is nothing but 
 an irrational growl of impossible, and improbable ; — 
 words from sentiments that would have choked steam, 
 electric telegraphs, and all our recent gifts of God, 
 if they could have forbidden experiment. Our direct 
 
30 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 evidence then is a sufficient reply to the unbased 
 tliouglitj that liomoeopatliy cannot tackle acute dis- 
 eases. 
 
 I see, however, in the thought an entire scepticism 
 of the powers of medicine on the part of the Allo- 
 paths. If drugs have any power over a disease lasting 
 for months and years, and whose roots therefore are 
 of terrible twistiness and oaken toughness, is it likely 
 they should be impotent over mushroom inflamma- 
 tions, mere ebullitions of the blood, caused by cold, 
 anger, grief, and other momentary occasions? The 
 Allopaths must rather mean, that in a disease of 
 years standing, nothing in the guise of medicine has 
 a better chance of being mistaken for something, 
 than in a disease which kills, or ceases, in a few 
 hours. They imply therefore that chronic patients 
 are* greater gulls than acute. In the long run I 
 doubt even this. But at any rate it is evident after 
 the fact of the great efficiency of Homoeopathy in 
 rapid inflammations, that all probability is on the 
 same side : that a system capable of treating chronic 
 cases successfully, is a fortiori strong in combating 
 acute diseases. Weeds a night old are, I repeat it, 
 more easy to rid from the earth than primeval forests ; 
 and such is precisely the analogy between acute and 
 chronic diseases. I grant, however, that you must 
 know how to do these small jobs of health gardening, 
 or the weeds will choke your field betimes. But then 
 happily the Homoeopaths do know how. 
 
 Here let me say a word about the only way of 
 investigating Homoeopathy. If you merely wish to 
 know what the facts of the ease are, you must receive 
 them from those who have elicited them, and whose 
 
ONLY ONE WAY OP TRYING HOMCEOPATHY. 31 
 
 testimony, world- wide, is unupposed. You cannot 
 gainsay them : you might as well deny the statistics 
 of the Board of Health, or the tables of meteorological 
 observations. This is however but a passive recep- 
 tion, though affirmative of necessity, such as you give 
 to Botany, or Mathematics, or Diamagnetism, or any 
 other science which you do not intend to work out 
 yourself. But if you would be a Homoeopath you 
 must proceed a step further, see practice by others, 
 then practise for yourself, and actually treat diseases. 
 There is no trying, or proving, no active knowledge 
 of Homoeopathy, but only this. Your opinion as to 
 what Homoeopathy is, always measures itself by your 
 answer to the question — How many cases have you 
 fairly treated, or seen treated ? Every successful aim 
 with a drug lightens it up from the great sun of facts, 
 and engraves its angel property of relief on your soul 
 for ever : that piece of knowledge is so active to you 
 that scepticism will never come near it. One such 
 good deed with one of these natural substances God 
 has given us, is like a virtue to a place ; its transac- 
 tion makes hallowed ground, and creates human or 
 historic memory. I know no way of learning 
 Homoeopathy at all short of this. When each article 
 of Materia Medica has got its knightly spurs for us 
 in this way, then for the first time it defends itself in 
 our minds. So our point is that skilful practice is 
 the king of belief, and that he who has not attained 
 to that has not investigated Homoeopathy. In all 
 this. Homoeopathy is precisely on a par with every 
 other business. Of course we have here left entirely 
 on one side those who will not submit to this ordeal : 
 they are in very fact those who have some other call- 
 
32 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 ing witlioiit knowing it, and do not wish to enter on 
 this profession, yet liave an nnfortunate hanker 
 against it which spoils them for their own vocation. 
 
 But failing utterly to shew that Homoeopathy is 
 either impossible, improbable, inadequate, slow or 
 unready, they turn round upon its practitioners, and 
 assert that they arc men who could not get on in the 
 old practice, and that therefore they have taken 
 refuge in Ilomceopathy as one of the last forms of 
 quackery. I am fond of making a proper admission 
 on this head. It is indeed true and afterwards likely 
 that the men who can study and apply the exquisite 
 system of specific treatment called Homoeopathy, 
 must have felt ill at ease in handling the gross, low 
 and destructive means of the old calling. To accuse 
 them on this score, is to impugn all those who have 
 the heart to rise from the ranks ; and who feel that 
 the lower walk is too low and too unclean for them. 
 Is it remarkable that a born general, who has the 
 w^ord of command instinct within him, but who from 
 adventitious circumstances is as yet a private, should 
 feel choky when he is blacking the boots, or grooming 
 the horse of some pert ensign. Depend upon it that 
 the pressure and goad of his innate vocation will 
 make him an indifferent shoe-black, and a clumsy 
 stableman. And so most surely a fitness for homoeo- 
 pathic practice will cause the possessor to fall short, 
 both in skill and success, of the jog-trot AUopathist, 
 so long as he is obliged, by any circumstances, to 
 continue in a field to which he does not belong. It 
 is reported in the same way that John Bunyan was 
 an exceedingly bad cobbler : and the world blesses 
 the fact. The progress of every pilgrim from the 
 
HAHNEMANN CREATES MATERIA MEDICA. 33 
 
 lower to the higher station is likely to be accom- 
 panied with some excellent incompetency of the kind. 
 They say too that the Homoeopaths have added 
 nothing to medical science : by which science they 
 mean their own jog-trot. Posterity however will not 
 be slow to acknowledge that Hahnemann has created 
 therapeutical medicine^ by furnishing it with a central 
 law round which the healing facts and instances of 
 ages^ revolve ; which has a new breadth of inductive 
 basis like the other new progressive sciences ; and a 
 co-extensive wealth of deductions, which go direct 
 into practical usefulness. Until Hahnemann was 
 sent by providence, there was not one drug that was 
 known by more than accident; each had come up 
 from the common people and the sim piers, to whom 
 it was known by either tradition, original hap, dogs 
 curing themselves by it in the grass, accidental 
 poisoning, or some other fortuity : it was applied to 
 just the original cases by the faculty, or at best by 
 guess to a limited circle of allied symptoms : and 
 this was Materia Medica. After Hahnemann the 
 leading drugs are already known in their effects upon 
 every region of the organism, head, chest, abdomen, 
 arms and legs ; mind and sensations : each medicinal 
 substance discloses a rich mine of symptoms : and 
 what is significant, the law oi similia shniUbus ciircin- 
 tur is no cold abstraction, but directly applies the 
 drug symptom elicited in the healthy organism, to 
 the cure of some similar symptoms of disease. I 
 know no instance of the conversion of an intellectual 
 so directly into a humanitary law : nothing more 
 unitedly creditable to the heart and head of a great 
 discoverer, than this principle announced by the lips 
 
 c3 
 
34 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 of Halmcmanu. And in all the range of the exact 
 sciences, there need be nothing more exact, than the 
 tallying of drug symptoms with symptoms of diseases, 
 in the hands of a skilful practitioner. It is positively 
 a concrete and practical as well as an exact science — 
 this science of the correspondence of therapeutics 
 with practical healing. 
 
 Perhaps however without an example you are 
 hardly aware of what I mean by this principle and 
 this correspondence. Let me then illustrate. Ipeca- 
 cuanha is a drug familiarly known to cause vomiting ; 
 and in Hahnemann's proving a number of other affec- 
 tions. Now then here, in this substance, we have a 
 prime remedy for vomiting when it occurs as any 
 part of the train of symptoms which belong to Ipeca- 
 cuanha. Yet another instance. Tobacco ftabacum) 
 produces depression and deadly faintness on those 
 unused to it : and there is, to my knowledge, no more 
 likely remedy for those states, often curing them at 
 once, and preventing their recurrence, than this 
 very tabacum. So also arsenic produces inflammation 
 of the stomach ; and it is a potent remedy for that 
 malady. Each medicine requires to be given in the 
 infinitesimal doses; for two reasons: 1. Because 
 otherwise it would directly increase the disease, going 
 specifically as it does to the very atoms of the diseased 
 part. 2. Because in the infinitesimal form it has a 
 wider and more profound curative power than when 
 administered in the gross. The facts prove that it is 
 so, and control probability. 
 
 We see therefore in thus giving the symptoms pro- 
 duced by drugs, that we are collecting the precise 
 means of extinguishing diseases ; and by the proving 
 
WHAT HAHNEMANN HAS DONE. 35 
 
 of each new drug we may hope to be able to do acts 
 of cure which were impossible before. In this way- 
 may we not expect that the whole field of disease 
 which has any real analogy with symptoms produced 
 by medicines, will be brought under control ? Most 
 clearly so. And as all mental and moral affefctions 
 also produce physical effects on the organism, these 
 effects can be reached by the same means ; and the 
 causes at all events be prevented from producing 
 lasting derangements in the body. Mental diseases 
 belong to a different department, but they too are in 
 a degree prevented from waxing when their natural 
 feet are taken away in the removal of their bodily 
 correspondents. 
 
 This then is what Hahnemann has done — to evoke 
 and train disciplined legions of drugs to wage the 
 battle against the legions of disease : he found a sullen 
 and scattered tribe of untutored warriors ; he left it 
 a mighty army, and one whose ranks are filling with 
 every year : and greatest praise of all, whilst heighten- 
 ing his poAvers of cure, he has made them utterly 
 harmless for destruction and offence. What other 
 man since the world began ever set in motion the 
 first beginning of so great a movement. Printing, 
 gunpowder, steam, electricity, the true Astronomy, 
 and all the realms of facts revealed, build up our 
 needful parts, and edify the societies of the world ; 
 but this matter, of slaying the old dragon medicine, 
 and successfully attacking disease with a charmed 
 new medicine and alkahest distilled out of that 
 dragon^s blood, is an affair that builds the very bones 
 and flesh of the race, prepares new generations of 
 health with successive births, and is properly the 
 
3G THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 foundiation, plasma and recipient of all other benefits 
 of art and science, and of all benefactions of God. 
 
 But besides that Homoeopathy has created Materia 
 ^Icdica, you will also find that it has placed sympto- 
 matology, or the doctrine of symptoms, upon an 
 entirely new basis, from which important results will 
 follow. In the old system, medicine has gathered up 
 all her knowledge under a few general heads of classi- 
 fication. Tliese are no doubt useful and convenient, 
 as the medical man's account of disease. But then 
 they are somewhat abstract and scanty, and are apt 
 to degenerate into mere names. There is however 
 another department, and that is, the patient's account 
 of the disease : a much longer story ; full of odd 
 sensations and experiences, and very little listened to 
 as yet. The doctors in general only hear enough of 
 it to enable them to glean what they consider to be 
 the matter according to their classification, but a good 
 part of the sad wealth of the tale, passes their ears 
 without entering them. They parry it and put it 
 aside as non-essential. Homceopathy does not do 
 this, because it wants precise symptoms to correspond 
 with the precision it has attained in the effects of 
 drugs upon the system ; and these symptoms it takes 
 from the reliable lips of the patient himself. Accord- 
 ingly it alone embraces the true and particular chro- 
 nicles of disease. In consequence, a new domain is 
 entered by it, and a new nosology created. In a 
 universal sense, this is something parallel to what the 
 stethoscope has done in the diseases of heart and 
 lungs, in which you no longer keep at a distance from 
 the patient's chest, and guess the condition within, 
 but you put your ear, and hear the state of the 
 
WHAT HAHNEMANN HAS DONE. o7 
 
 breathing, and the rhythm of the beating. So in 
 Homoeopathy, you take the patient's words as a kind 
 of tube which reveals to your very ear the universal 
 condition of his morbid sensations. A vast and un- 
 trodden region also now awaits future medical disco- 
 verers here, in the correspondence of sensations, pains 
 and discomforts with physical morbid states : as for 
 instance, what the state of pieces of the brain is during 
 stabbing headaches, during feelings of an iron band 
 round the forehead, and other parts, and so forth. 
 So you see that Homoeopathy can justly claim to have 
 created not only Materia Medica, but also the living 
 history of disease ; and the latter, by the simple and 
 humane method of setting some store by the patient's 
 own account of his feelings. 
 
 But what Hahnemann has done will appear more 
 clearly from the sequel, when I direct your attention 
 to the functions of a Board of Health, which are now 
 for the first time clear and feasible from his life and 
 actions. At present I will only remark that his 
 shining wake is occupied by active successors, who 
 not content with their daily rounds of health- giving, 
 are also laboring earnestly at the proving and win- 
 ning of new drugs, that fill their places in the great 
 chart of remedial science. Such are the additions to 
 materia medica of lachesis, cobra, podophyllum, and 
 many others, known nothing of by the orthodox 
 profession, and yet most indispensable in some of the 
 worst maladies at the bed of sickness. I mention 
 tliis to shew that in Homoeopathy we have a pro- 
 gressive science and a progressive art. This is not 
 the case with old physic. A progi'essive science is 
 one which on the foundation of to-day builds the 
 
38 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 basement of to-morroAv^ the structure of the next 
 day, the superstructure of the next ; and so on : that 
 is to say, which preserves the past continually in the 
 present. Old physic is no progressive, but a transitive 
 science, always digging new foundations ; busy in the 
 bowels of the earth on Sunday : deserting that hole, 
 and making a new one on ^Monday : another on 
 Tuesday : and so on through the everlasting animal 
 weeks. It has therefore no age in it, and, strange as 
 it may appear. Homoeopathy is older than what calls 
 itself orthodoxy, which dates its constant year 1 
 from the last new discoveries of chemistry. Homoeo- 
 pathy, on the other hand, holds what it has, and 
 by the constant living agency of its law, adds 
 rapid accretions of valuable and really habitable facts. 
 The discoveries of Hahnemann are the pith and 
 marrow, and the first ring of growth ; others already 
 are formed around these : and so it will be with the 
 mighty oak of therapeutics, in which the vast girth 
 of a thousand years hence will enclose in tender 
 keeping the sapling of the Hahnemannian art. 
 
 Sir, and my Countrymen, I have troubled you 
 with something very like a squabble, and bandied 
 words with old physic in your official parlor, because, 
 for other reasons, and besides that we have been pro- 
 voked, I meet the good-for-nothing old fellow there 
 making the most pompous requests of public opinion 
 and of the Government of this country. After 
 having vacated all his public fimctions, and interfered 
 with the ediles and the street-sweepers, he comes 
 with the loudest double raps at the door of Parlia- 
 ment, to request that his vacant chair may be kept 
 vacant and still called his ; and that all unqualified 
 
OLD PHYSIC PESTERS PARLIAMENT. 39 
 
 practitioners, and all branches of healing unrecog- 
 tiized by his clubs, may be summarily dealt -with. 
 Whoso is not '^ registered ^^ in his book of life, is to 
 be haled before a magistrate, and dismissed the neigh- 
 borhood in which his heterodoxy flourishes. Many 
 a good homoeopathic sphere of usefulness might thus 
 be cut short ; and many a private envy, hatred and 
 malice be gratified at the expense of the public. And 
 the reason for dealing summarily with us would be, 
 that we are guilty of ^*^ irregular practice." Now 
 ^' regular practice " means, if anything, practice ac- 
 cording to certain rules previously laid down, but 
 where, oh ! ye sharpest-sighted, are the rules in the 
 old practice of medicine ? I know no rules approxi- 
 mating to anything like certainty, and connected 
 even with the subject, but the figures of the bills of 
 mortality. Be it enacted then that sixty-five persons 
 out of every hundred attacked shall die of cholera ; 
 whoso cures seventy out of the hundred is by the 
 aggravating fact of thirty-five citizens saved an irre- 
 gular practitioner. Be it enacted that two hundred 
 souls do decease out of the Ville de Paris next time 
 that good ship is in the Black Sea : otherwise rule, 
 nay, experience, will be violated.; and some Homoeo- 
 pathist will have to bear the brunt of having out- 
 raged the old colleges by rescuing 110 French sailors 
 from a water bm'ial. Is not such irregularity in all 
 departments of medicine the one thing needful, and 
 who can tell how to get it, but by allowing the "NA'idest 
 hberty to all kinds of practice. The wildest freaks 
 of invention cannot be more deadly than the ortho- 
 dox rules. No quack, even if he came at the head of 
 a battalion, each man canying a revolver, and de- 
 
40 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 clarcd that liis patent consisted in the discharge of 
 its pills among tlie crew, could be more alarming 
 than these regulars with their smiles before, and 
 their statistics afterwards. Understand, then. Sir, 
 and my Countrymen, that the danger here does not 
 lie on the side of irregular practice. 
 
 Nothing can be gained by putting down what you 
 please to call quacks. There are many men and 
 women, who from circumstances cannot obtain a 
 diploma, but who have a medical eye in their heads 
 worth a thousand times the sigillum maximum of the 
 best college upon earth. A Preissnitz is an example 
 that shines with its own unborrowed light, and shews 
 that nature is the fountain of every profession, and 
 raises sons to enlarge and supersede it when it grows 
 old and stiff. If these men, too, are limited, and 
 kill sometimes, it is precisely because they now and 
 then take a leaf out of the book of the old routine, 
 — because they have moments of orthodoxy and pe- 
 dantry, and sink occasionally into the false estate of 
 rules and ruts : but where their instincts and their 
 humanity are awake and active, they are safe and 
 healing. Their murders by pedantry, though lament- 
 able, are as nothing to those which take place on the 
 old plan. 
 
 What I should propose to Parliament, instead of 
 this attempt to put down " quacks,^^ is a simple bill 
 making it obligatory upon each medical practitioner, 
 man or woman, to declare their style and titles 
 without reserve. Let any one in the kingdom who 
 pleases be a doctor, but let him or her say where 
 they got the degree. If they have taken it by what 
 they conceive to be natural right, let them be forced 
 
MY MEDICAL BILL. 41 
 
 to add S.D., or Self Dubbed; or N.M.D.C.R. Loud. : 
 the N siguifying Non ; or iudeed any other letters 
 intelligibly conveying their particular assumption. 
 And let there be a general registration of all medical 
 practitioners of every class, done with no partiality 
 for any alumnus^ or any sex ; so that the public shall 
 know exactly the credentials of those whose brass- 
 plates they seCj and whom they may choose to call 
 in. By this means credentials w^W. have whatever 
 weight belongs to them^ and the light of honesty 
 will shine out upon the stock and origin of each 
 man's or woman's first pretensions. And as there 
 will be no slur in being undubbed or self dubbed, so 
 let no concealment be tolerated, but summary juris- 
 diction await those who, after reasonable notice, are 
 not duly registered. Let also the takiug of an un- 
 authorized title be a case of swindling. The registra- 
 tion itself must be in the hands of the tax-collectors, 
 or some other house to house functionaries, and be 
 altogether exempt from the hands of the old medical 
 profession. And the book of registration must be 
 an annual Government report. The colleges, of 
 course, can publish lists of their own members, and 
 any other matters of private interest to themselves. 
 
 There is no more reason. Sir, why Government 
 should directly patronize one kind of medical educa- 
 tion, and destroy the practice of those medical prac- 
 titioners who have not received it, than why they 
 should grant privileges to one set of bakers, land- 
 lords, or butchers, and declare all others irregular. 
 Happily now a days honesty and competency have so 
 far gained a standing, that they will take care of 
 themselves without the props of Government patron- 
 
4i2 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 age; and the diploma of a good medical college, 
 certifying to a sound education, will have all the force 
 that is desirable without being armed with the terrors 
 of the magistracy. The fear rather is, that respec- 
 tability of itself should overbear all other more native 
 gifts ; and this will continue to be the case long after 
 medicine has entered the sj^lcndid path of free trade. 
 On the other hand, by opening the gates of medicine, 
 you will allow new medical education to arise, and by 
 competing with the old, to exact a greater perfection, 
 and a great strictness in all departments. Thereafter 
 we shall have real medical enterprize ; and this kind 
 of central and life-giving energy is the only thing 
 that ought to be protected by the State. The pro- 
 tection consists in the maintenance of entire liberty. 
 Were the contrary system to be carried out, ac- 
 cording to the wish of the old profession, medical 
 science would w-alk about with a cord round its 
 throat, which becoming gradually tighter and tighter, 
 must eventually strangle it. Only fancy the law 
 against irregular practice put in strict force, and 
 what would happen ? After the Homoeopaths were 
 destroyed by it, the least routine of the old doctors 
 would begin to be eyed savagely by their more or- 
 thodox felloes : the last set of allopathic ideas and 
 experiments would give up the ghost under the 
 hangman's noose. Then another batch of more timid 
 novelty-seekers would come on the tumbril to the 
 gallows. And so on, by successive processions to 
 death, of all that had a semblance of progress ; until 
 at length a few old barber siu'geons and centenarian 
 physicians would represent the medical profession. 
 Wakley and Co. would be the Last Man — left bloom- 
 
MEDICAL TOLERATION. 43 
 
 ing alone : tearful roses of tlie desert ; for too late 
 they might find out that though extreme degrees of 
 heterodoxy, such as Homoeopathy, may profitably be 
 crushed, yet that to carry out the principle of de- 
 molishing all medical heresies, is to involve the san- 
 guinary Lancet and its subscribers in one common 
 ruin. We appeal to them therefore by their dear 
 love of coin not to enter upon a path at the end of 
 which their own destined workhouse lies. 
 
 Moreover in this land one of our noblest advances 
 consists in having attained to the very reverse of this 
 kind of slavery of articles, tenets and subscriptions in 
 other most important matters. Time was when 
 Quaker itinerants and Methodist ministers were 
 hunted down by the law, and baited by the rabble 
 instigated by the gentry : but that time has gone for 
 ever. Religious dissent is not only allowed ; but any 
 one can be Reverend who pleases ; provided, I pre- 
 sume, he does not take a false title, and commit an 
 act of swindling. Meantime, the universities have 
 maintained all their standing ; and the claimants for 
 their honors and degrees are not less numerous than 
 heretofore. Is it likely that a Parliament and a 
 people which has for some centuries successfully 
 waged the war of religious toleration, should now 
 rear the banner of medical absolutism ; and allow 
 the doctors, who cannot even pretend to any such 
 approach to unity as Thirty-nine Articles, to eject 
 from their houses, homes and occupations all medical 
 dissenters, simply because they do not bow the knee 
 to that great veiled idol, (which I suspect to be 
 merely a gold- laced coat and a pair of official beadle's 
 
44 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 breeches with nobody in them^) called Regular Prac- 
 tice? 
 
 If all other reasons were wanting against such a 
 consummation, there is a reason of decency which 
 would still be valid to every true-born Briton. If 
 we are to have a connexion of medicine with the 
 State like the connexion of Church and State, her 
 most gracious ^Majesty Queen ^^ictoria, God bless 
 her, must then become Defender of the Pharmaco- 
 poeia, as she is now Defender of the Faith. Regina, 
 Defensor Fidei, necnon et Pharmacopeice Londinensis ! 
 The very penny pieces would blush in their brazen 
 faces to find her sacred image so associated. The 
 pockets of every one of us, if not made of impudence 
 or asbestos, would be scorched into holes by the burn- 
 ing Britannia on the obverse. This reason alone is 
 demonstration that Parliament will never consent to 
 place her Majesty and the coin of this realm in so 
 base a juxtaposition; which yet they must clearly 
 do, if once they connect the State with the medical 
 colleges. Nay worse, but where is this to end ? 
 Were Parliament, Sir, and my Countrymen, so weak, 
 or indeed so mad, every other calling in the empire 
 would on principle exact a similar connexion. The 
 Queen would become, by consent of her poor check- 
 mated ministers, defender of orthodox cheesemongery, 
 orthodox old clothes, orthodox and regular boots and 
 shoes, and all other departments of traffic. Very 
 shortly after that, both Houses of Convocation would 
 humbly petition to be f/z"sconnected from her most 
 gracious Majesty ; the Church in a body would 
 join the Dissenters, and the Archbishop of Can- 
 
MEDICAL FREE TRADE. 45 
 
 terbury contumaciously preach in Ebenezcr Chapel 
 on alternate Sundays with Rev. Lohaire Stratekutt ; 
 and all this ruin would have been effected to please 
 Mr. Brady and his aiders and abettors of the old me- 
 dical schools. Thus conservatism and medical Pu- 
 seyism would in the end turn out to be revolution ; a 
 w^ord and a thing which every good citizen abhors. 
 Heaven and Lord Palmerston defend us from so 
 dread a crisis ! 
 
 How is it, Sir, that other branches of human ac- 
 tivity flourish in this energetic country ? Assuredly 
 by no government protection. It is a law of British 
 nature, perhaps of universal Man, that wherever a 
 monopoly of any kind is given, an indifferent article 
 is sure to be the result. Were we angels instead of 
 Angles, the case would be to some extent the same. 
 For one great evoker of excellence and improvement 
 is undoubtedly contrast and comparison of different 
 wares. Under monopoly, whether it be monopoly 
 granted to doctrines, or to cotton, or bread stuffs, 
 there are neither contrast nor comparison, nor conse- 
 quently emulation, but a single unvarying method of 
 production, and a single result. Society, made up of 
 diverse members — each exciting the other in the great 
 race of which the world is the course, protests by its 
 very constitution against any nation, profession, or 
 calling, taking up a position which is fatal to the im- 
 provement and alteration of the individual. All this 
 has become so trite now, and in the most material 
 sphere, that I must apologize for recapitulating it. 
 However, there is this excuse : it is as yet imperfectly 
 seen that the same freedom that supplies us with 
 bread will also supply us wdth physic. 
 
46 THE MINISTRY OF HEATH. 
 
 It lias been too often tliouglit that institutions 
 create the handicrafts and mindcrafts that flourish 
 under their sway, and, as I think, often in spite of 
 them. The fact appears to be, that in every great 
 nation there are successive drifts in its mind and 
 bent, amounting to a national organism ; and which 
 incite a certain portion of its sons and daughters to 
 specific occupations. Thus England has perhaps a 
 larger proportion of maritime drift in its genius than 
 other countries, — more born sailors. Now these drifts 
 are the issue of a fire in the very hearths heart, which 
 is always pointing its flame finger towards its objects. 
 Cunning are they beyond all laws and thoughts, to 
 find their way to gratification, for they are human 
 instincts a thousand times more pressing and forcible 
 than any ,animal instincts. No nation has them burn- 
 ing in the deep kilns of its subterrene, more power- 
 fully than Britain, and hence the quantity of pro- 
 verbial wisdom directly aiming to remove impediments 
 to their gratification. '^ A clear stage and no favor ^' 
 is one of these saw^s ; and this is in reality all that is 
 wanted by an industrious people from its Government. 
 To allow each man to get scent of the business which 
 will be his forte, and to exercise it without hindrance, 
 is the single point to be attained : and this is best 
 done by Government assuming as its grand end, indi- 
 vidual freedom, and using its force to prevent all ex- 
 ternal pressure, especially of bodies and corporations, 
 upon the mind, thought, invention, and originality 
 of the private man. We may rely upon it, that at 
 any given moment, the quantity of the latent instinct 
 brought to bear, is small compared with that which is 
 smothered by the circumpressure of old habits, guilds 
 
MEDICINE UNCRAMPED. 47 
 
 and conventionalities ; which act upon the genius of 
 a nation much as Chinese nurses upon the feet of fe- 
 male infants^ and stunt it into ugly Chinese beauty. 
 If, therefore, you want more display of the genius of 
 physic, just take off the iron shoes with which the 
 apothecaries have shod infant medicine, the tight 
 garters with which the surgeons have tourniquetted 
 its legs ; the crushing stays with which the stately 
 physicians have given it a wasp's waist instead of a 
 Hygeia's heart and lungs; the choker of parliamentary 
 privilege which is around its neck, and the great 
 stone hat of monopoly which the Journalists have put 
 upon its head ; and let it have loose robes, and fairly 
 grow. You will then see what goodly proportions the 
 Science of Healing has, and when the cruel creases 
 of its bondage have been outgrown, you will find that 
 Nature had provided it with a beauty and a strength 
 that only wanted a clear stage and no favor to develop 
 themselves. 
 
 It is manifest too, that the quantity of healing in 
 a community sufi'ers by all privileges given to one set 
 of professors. For medicine is not one only, but a 
 body and congeries — an organism of arts ; and if you 
 endow those whose bent calls them to a single branch, 
 you thereby discourage and probably alienate nume- 
 rous other cultivators whose genius incites them to 
 other departments. In this way, while a profession 
 seems to be full, it may really be overstocked with 
 one kind of practitioners who are comparatively little 
 wanted, and offer no supply of other descriptions for 
 which there is the greatest exigency. And this takes 
 place because you will not leave Nature's and Provi- 
 dence's work to them, but undertake it without the 
 
48 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 means of fulfilling: it. Sucli is exactly the case -uith 
 medicine at present. Drugs and dosers there are in 
 abundance, and straightway the cry is, that the sci- 
 ence and art of healing are overstocked ; w hereas in 
 very fact, there are at least a dozen great departments 
 of that art which have next to no professors, and the 
 bodies of men suffer from the law-enacted banishment 
 of eleven-twelfths of their ministers. Of consequence 
 the young men and the rising talent of the country 
 fail of their native occupations, and irregular lives and 
 powers thrown away are too often observed among us. 
 Nay, these compressed and stunted instincts breed all 
 kinds of social diseases, and many a clever dishonesty 
 has undoubtedly to be laid to the door of the mono- 
 polies and privileges that have barred men from their 
 rightful callings. This will be rectified, Sir, and my 
 Countrymen, in one matter, whenever Parliament 
 leaves physic entirely alone to its own private re- 
 sources. 
 
 Of course whenever a practitioner does a piece of 
 culpable mischief, he will still be as liable to an action 
 at law, for an assault, as he is at present. The only 
 difference will be, that his diploma will form no part 
 of the eloquence of counsel, of the scrutiny of medical 
 prosecutors, or of the prejudices of the jmy. The 
 question will be as to the injury inflicted by his in- 
 competency, violence, or neglect. I do not anticipate 
 that the actions against non-licentiates of colleges 
 will become more numerous than at present ; for pro- 
 bably there will then be fewer practising non-licenti- 
 ates than now, because medical education will become 
 immeasurably less expensive. But there will, I ex- 
 pect, be for a few years a considerable increase of law 
 
THE LAWYERS FIND OUT OLD PHYSIC. 49 
 
 proceedings against the regular practitioners. For as 
 other bodies will have come into the field on a per- 
 fectly equal footing, — bodies that use no violent 
 means, no corrosive drugs, no health-sapping mercu- 
 rials — it can hardly fail to happen that these bodies, 
 and the individuals they rear, will educate the public 
 in their own sense of the destructive doings of the old 
 school, in their own horror of drugging and its effects; 
 and a public, so tempered, will, it may easily be fore- 
 seen, resent the frequent cases of physical ruin from 
 drugs and bleedings occurring among its valued 
 members. Many new legal questions will thus doubt- 
 less arise : as this for instance : whether a man is not 
 entitled to compensation for having lost a week^s 
 work, or a year's work, from a black draught, or a 
 hundred such, administered to the patient's injury : 
 it being proved by parallel Homoeopathic cases, that 
 the whole of this treatment could have been done 
 without, with benefit to the man's health, and ensur- 
 ing his speedy recovery. 2. Whether a case of bleed- 
 ing, similarly proved to be no part of the art of 
 healing, will not be liable to heavy costs from the 
 doctor who has shed blood under professional pre- 
 tences. For mark you, there is now an art in the 
 world which has disallowed bleeding. What the 
 damage for a child's teeth rotted out of its head by 
 calomel treatment, when Homoeopathy would have 
 cured the sickness without, and left the teeth stand- 
 ing ? What the damages for a little boy ruptured in 
 nature's violent struggle to regurgitate the nauseous 
 mixture which Homoeopathy would have had no call 
 to give him, and which left him worse than it found 
 him, i^lus a Hernia for the surgeon to take care of? I 
 
 D 
 
50 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 might extend the list of actionable and criminal 
 causes to any amount : but these will suffice. And 
 they will inevitably come up, as I said before, from 
 the juxtaposition, on equal terms, of Homoeopathy 
 and its benign means, with the murderous old prac- 
 tice of medicine. Parliament ought to be prepared 
 for these cases, of which no doubt it will have warning 
 in the perplexities of the judges, declaring that all the 
 equity is on the side of the prosecution, but that the 
 law requires to be brought up to the progress of 
 humane events. The end undoubtedly will be, to 
 strike at the root of the mischief, and to forbid the 
 administration of drugs altogether in Allopathic doses; 
 which will be no interference with liberty, but simply 
 with the vend and application of palpable poisons. 
 This has been done already with arsenic, oxalic acid, 
 and other deadly substances, so far as the public is 
 concerned ; and this, simply because it is known that 
 the public can do without such matters profitably, 
 and can make no good use of them, but may do ter- 
 rible harm. Whenever such is known with regard to 
 the doctors and their drugs; when moreover it is 
 known that their chance of doing harm is a hundred- 
 fold greater than that of a man who buys rats' -bane 
 and leaves it carelessly for his household ; the same 
 corollary of action and law must apply to them also : 
 and this will be the case when once the public is 
 instructed in Homoeopathy. 
 
 Nor is it alone in medical cases, so called, that 
 Parliament will ultimately be called upon to interfere 
 in protecting the liberties of the public, and modify- 
 ing the institutions that have grown up under the 
 despotism of the colleges. It is well known what a 
 
HOMCEOPATHY LAYS HAND ON SURGERY. 51 
 
 prejudice there is in the poorer classes against our 
 hospitals. This is due to many causes ; no doubt in 
 a measure to a certain jealousy that poor people have, 
 of receiving gratuitous benefactions ; and to a feeling 
 that when within those walls they are encircled by a 
 power that has their bodies in its keeping, and which 
 may try experiments with them while they themselves 
 have no appeal. I believe for the most part that the 
 poor are as well treated by old physic as the rich, 
 and perhaps they escape sooner out of its clutches. 
 As they stand affected by surgery, however, the case 
 is different ; and assuredly numerous operations are 
 annually performed by adroit surgeons that are not 
 warranted by medical laws. Surgery is the residuum 
 and caput moriuum of physic ; what other skill cannot 
 cure is left for the knife. Hence the amount of sur- 
 gical operations is determined by the state of the 
 medical art ; where this is high, operations are few : 
 where it is bungling and injurious, operative surgery 
 is multiplied. Now as we know that old physic by 
 no means represents what can be done by therapeu- 
 tical means, it follows that operations are in the main 
 not justifiable until the patients have had the better 
 chance afforded by Homoeopathic treatment. To be 
 operated on at the dictum of an Allopath, is as if a 
 prisoner were to be condemned by a coronei^'s jury, 
 and executed forthwith : when we know that there is a 
 still further process sifting the rights of life and 
 justice, and that a grand jury alone can decide on the 
 capital events of a case. All that the Allopathist 
 ought to do, is to commit a patient for operation ; the 
 Homoeopathist alone should sentence him to undergo 
 it. Hence the public necessity, in the interest of the 
 
 d2 
 
52 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 poor, of superadding, by authority of Parliament, a 
 coequal Ilomocopatliic staff to each and all of our 
 great hospitals and infirmaries. And this could only 
 be done fairly by giving up a proportion of beds to 
 the Homoeopaths, who would then enter upon their 
 judicial functions in full medical robes. I have long 
 felt that a board of sanction is necessary to allow or 
 disallow all and singular operations on the human 
 frame ; and to prevent dapper surgeons from cutting 
 off what they canH put on again ; and this is all the 
 more necessary, since chloroform has rendered opera- 
 tions so painless at the time, that tempting bits may 
 be lopped without the least expostulation from the 
 patient. Now then is the time for Parliament, led 
 on by Mr. Brady, to interfere. The Homoeopaths 
 may do the old profession a kind service here ; and I 
 am sure that even Mr. Wakley will not be sorry to 
 shift some part of the responsibility of great opera- 
 tions on to their shoulders. Should it unfortunately 
 happen that the medical officers of any existing hos- 
 pital are contumacious, and repudiate their new 
 colleagues. Parliament can provide for the case, accept 
 their resignation, and decree that the whole stajff may 
 be occupied by the Homoeopathic corps. 
 
 I do not limit these remarks to cases ordinarily 
 regarded as medical and constitutional, such as can- 
 cer, scrofulous swellings of the knee, tumors, and the 
 like ; for in fact accidents in their treatment and cure 
 are just as much medical cases as any others. One 
 of the strangest laches of the old profession is its total 
 disregard, nay now total oblivion and ignorance, of 
 what have for hundreds of years been termed vulne- 
 rary remedies, i. e., medicaments that have a direct 
 
SURGEON-HERBS UNKNOWN TO SURGEONS. 53 
 
 power of healing injuries and wounds. So inscient 
 are the doctors of the existence of such a fact, that I 
 doubt not they will smile at my extreme credulity in 
 alleging it. And yet it is most true that arnica in 
 very weak solution as a lotion, and in infinitesimal 
 doses administered inwardly, has marvellous power in 
 ob\iating the bad effects of bruises and wounds of 
 all sorts ; nay, also of bodily fatigue : that rhus toxi- 
 codendron has a similar power over strains, sprains, 
 injuries of ligaments and tendons : that calendula, 
 the common marigold, does the like Christian office 
 for deep wounds in which much flesh is lost; pro- 
 moting their filling up, and obviating the extent of 
 scars : and that Symphytum, (the common great com- 
 frey,) is as uniting for broken bones as the others for 
 other lesions."^ The series goes far beyond this ; so 
 far, that in all scientific probability every organ and 
 part of us has surgeon-herbs corresponding to it, and 
 which repau' its mischances. No range of facts in 
 the world is better authenticated than the curative 
 powers that these substances exert upon the effects of 
 accidents : in common with hundreds of my Homoeo- 
 pathic brethren I see those powers in benignant action 
 every day. Now what are we to think of the fact, 
 that the London hospitals ignore all these things, and 
 have nothing to put in their places : nothing but 
 saturnine lotions, calomel, purges, leeching, blood- 
 taking, and other remedies for inflammation that 
 would never have arisen had aconite and arnica been 
 employed in the Homoeopathic way. Such a fact brings 
 
 * Solomon's seal, the common daisy, all the stonecrops, eyebright, 
 tamus communis, and hundreds of other herbs are wound-herbs ; 
 known as such to the rustics, but unknown to the medical profession. 
 
54 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 these hospitals at once to the judgment bar of the 
 public, and opinion cannot do other than demand of 
 Parliament that, apart from all medical supercilious- 
 ness, the poor of this realm shall have secured to 
 them, in their hour of sickness if not torture, the 
 benefit of all the means that are known for their safe 
 and rapid recovery, and return to their firesides and 
 their toils. 
 
 It will perhaps be alleged that arnica has already- 
 had a trial in one of the London hospitals, and failed. 
 Sir, and my Countrymen, do not believe it. Arnica 
 is a Homoeopathic remedy, and produces sufferings 
 not unlike those caused by mechanical injuries; and 
 hence, if exhibited in large doses, (as was, I under- 
 stand, the case in the professed trial alluded to,) it 
 will produce an aggravation of the mischief, which 
 will force the medical attendant to discontinue its 
 use. The fair trial can only take place in the Homoeo- 
 pathic way, of attenuated dilutions, and infinitesi- 
 mals ; it must be superintended by a skilful Homoeo- 
 pathist, and all Allopathic drugs suspended at the 
 time. No such trial has been made, nor can be made 
 in our great hospitals, until either their officers be- 
 come "converted characters,'^ or a Homoeopathic 
 staff is appointed to them, to oversee and correct at 
 least that part of their practice. 
 
 I look forward Avith great interest to the Parlia- 
 mentary action, led on by Mr. Brady, on this im- 
 portant question. The thing is so manifestly humane, 
 that it would be uncharitable to doubt the speedy in- 
 tervention of the collective wisdom upon it. The 
 results to the poor will be a new lease of limb and 
 life in many delightful cases; while moreover as a 
 
THE POOR FREED FROM HOBSON's CHOICE. 55 
 
 body they will be converted to the hospitals, think 
 of them kindly when they are well ; toast them with 
 grateful recollections, and the women with streaming 
 eyes, when Christmas flames shine brightly on the 
 assembled families of many cottages. And then the 
 effect on the medical profession will be, to bring out 
 the truth and goodness of Homoeopathy in such a 
 white light of superiority to what they already know 
 and do, that they will experience the happiness of 
 entering a new world which the best among them 
 have of course always been seeking ; a vast realm of 
 healing, which their sons, and sons^ sons, will be 
 privileged to explore. I only hope the war will be 
 speedily finished, to give the next session of the 
 legislature no excuse for withholding from us for one 
 unnecessary hour these vast treasure-troves of a new 
 humanity. 
 
 On a single other ground also, and one of the 
 most considerate kind, I would base my advocacy of 
 the introduction of a Homoeopathic department into 
 the hospitals of Great Britain and Ireland. It would 
 give the poor a choice in medical practice, and it 
 would be seen which they like best. Allopathy or 
 Homoeopathy. To ascertain this would be very im- 
 portant; because in fact ultimately the public are 
 the judges of good and bad doctoring, safe means 
 and unsafe, cure or no cure. So that the testimony 
 of the masses of this country might settle much ; 
 might provide convenient statistics for guiding the 
 choice of the other classes; and even might influ- 
 ence the medical officers by showing them the prac- 
 tice most in demand. If Allopathy went to the wall 
 in this way, they could not say it was anything but 
 
56 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 ( fair : people have a riglit to call in ^vliom tliey please : 
 j there was no demand for the article, and it would 
 j^not pay to supply it. Patients also could compare 
 notes with each other so well under these circum- 
 stances : the man who had used arnica and Symphytum 
 for his broken leg on the same day that the other 
 broken leg had been left to nature assisted by leeches, 
 liquor plumbi, and pill and draught, in dancing a 
 hornpipe to his still bed-ridden allopathizcd brother, 
 would be so very contrastive : and the induction so 
 Baconian and immediate. The men who had fallen 
 from a scaffolding together, and both concussed their 
 brains, and of whom the one had received a tasteless 
 arnica and belladonna (which " could do no good,^^ as 
 the Allopathist said when he went with his drawn 
 lancet at the jugular of the other,) while the second 
 had had all inflammation prevented by drawing all 
 that was red out of his veins till his lips were as 
 white as mushroom stalks, and his toes as cold; — 
 these two men, of whom the arnica victim assisted 
 in the ward in the last offices to the thoroughly and 
 scientifically and orthodoxly and coroner^s-inquestly 
 treated other; — these two men, as I said before, 
 would furnish medical politics for the hospital, if 
 they could only occur in one ward. Unhappily now 
 they happen remote from each other ; and the benefit 
 of comparison and contrast are lost. Shall not 
 science be entitled (by Parliament, led on by Mr. 
 Brady) to receive the edifying spark of their colli- 
 sion? 
 
 I would give the world myself to be present in the 
 waiting-room for out-patients, after the two classes 
 of patients are duly received together : to see the 
 
OLD PHYSIC AND THE LAUGH. 
 
 57 
 
 passions, emotions, conditions, that conld not fail to 
 be called out : to find all the joking gradually shifting 
 sides. The laughter would of course begin against 
 the Homoeopaths, '' who can do nothing ;" but not 
 slowly English mother wit would stand upon its right 
 heels. As soon as it became a matter of choice, 
 those who chose bleeding, blistering, mercurializing, 
 purging, nauseating, would become fair game for the 
 opposite patients, and excepting in the case of heavy 
 sickness, when pity alone and silence could prevail, 
 they would have to go, each man with his quart 
 bottle to his self-appointed and dirty doom, through 
 such a fire of jests as once hearing wonld create a 
 Dickens, and running over fill a Thackeray in its 
 course. The police would have to interfere to keep 
 the editors of Punch from the spot, to which they 
 would come rushing, ^^each with his golden urn," 
 *^^ drawing light." But I forbear to dwell on this 
 important scene which will assuredly take place one 
 day in our grave infirmaries ; though whenever that 
 day dawns, the laughter-cure will shew how various 
 nature is in her possibilities of restoration. 
 
 Now, Sir, and my Countrymen, a good general 
 takes into account the hindrances and difficulties 
 which are likely to interfere with his plans, lays all 
 down beforehand, has expedients for emergencies, 
 reckons losses, leaves a margin for the exaggeration 
 of hope and forecasting, has reserves of courage sta- 
 tioned firm in his heart against disappointments; and 
 in short works with the eye and hand of genius and 
 tactics upon the whole broad field of occasion. I 
 have striven to emulate such a man, and as I foresee 
 difficulties, even if we should have the powerful assist- 
 
 d3 
 
58 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 ancc of Parliament led on by INIr. Brady, I would 
 liumbly propose another strategy should the allopa- 
 thic fortress not capitulate at once. The mode has 
 succeeded already ^vith Corn Laws, and Navigation 
 Laws, and might equally avail to put us right on this 
 vital matter of the Physic Laws. I propose then a 
 Parliamentary Committee, to enquires into the effects 
 of drugs and the drugging system, and of bleeding, 
 upon the health of the population of Great Britain 
 and Ireland. This will be a fair part, nay, a capital 
 front and beginning to the sanitary movement. And 
 the Blue Book which issues from the labors of that 
 committee, will serve as an important index for me- 
 dical reform. The public will be deeply interested in 
 it, which is more than can be said of the Parlia- 
 mentary action upon medical titles and registration, 
 which, though transacted in the highest court, is 
 nothing more than the echo of professional squabbles. 
 A material part of the enquiry may consist in returns 
 of the imports and vend by the great drug houses, of 
 calomel, opium, iodine, drastic purges, narcotic ex- 
 tracts generally, and all the more virulent drugs ; 
 also of the quantities of the same consumed in the 
 great hospitals respectively. This will give an ap- 
 proximative conception of what the public undergoes 
 in medical treatment, and whether any marked effects 
 upon public health are likely to be the result. It 
 will rest, of course, with the committee to call what 
 witnesses they please ; and they, and the legal gen- 
 tlemen associated with them to make the proper 
 astuteness up, will demise the means of procuring 
 impartial evidence with a mastership of which I can 
 have no idea. In the meantime it is clear, as they 
 
HOMCEOPATHY CALLS WITNESSES. 59 
 
 wish to learn the effects of drugging on the sick, and 
 as the allopathic doctors, though sick enough, are 
 proverbial for not taking their own medicines, that 
 it will not be necessary to put any direct questions to 
 the medical profession. At best it may be enough to 
 query one or two renowned physicians, just to ascer- 
 tain what can be said, but with no view to the facts 
 of the case. It is the patients of the United King- 
 dom who have to depose how they feel and are after 
 the drugs. 
 
 Probably the masters of great factories might be 
 useful witnesses to call among the first: I mean, some 
 of those humane chiefs of industry who make it their 
 business to observe the condition of their workmen ; 
 and who are so well respected, that if they were to 
 issue a request to the men in their employ, they could 
 easily obtain a reliable statistic, with concrete details, 
 of what had been the upshot of the doctoring in 
 several hundred families. They might learn how 
 many children had died under assiduous treatment ; 
 whether calomel and blistering had been largely or 
 long employed in each case; how many leechings 
 or bleedings had preceded dissolution ; and whether 
 the treatment had been satisfactory to the parents, or 
 not : also whether in their notion physicking was any 
 cause of poverty, by wearing out the mothers, and 
 weakening the right arms of the laboring popidation. 
 They might also ascertain whether in a hundred cases, 
 any proportion of the patients fell into bad habits of 
 which the seeds were sown by the use of drugs; whe- 
 ther, for example, a little opium pill gave, in any 
 determinable ratio, a taste for a little bigger piece of 
 opium afterwards, and laid the foundation for opium- 
 
60 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 eating or laudaiium drinking : and ^vllctllcr the sup- 
 ply of warm substances for a sinking at the stomach 
 ever, and in how many cases, led to intemperance. 
 Also whether the enfeebling caused (that is, if caused) 
 by bleeding and drugging, ever, and in how many 
 cases, conducted to the same result, as an escape 
 from the depression of mind and body. They may 
 also enquire w^hether the habit of poisoning which has 
 appeared as a horrid nightshade in some of our rural 
 districts, had been sown un-wittingly in bad minds by 
 the propagation of the drugging system. Benefit 
 societies and clubs might usefully furnish some facts, 
 particularly as they now include patients of various 
 systems ; and it might be seen whether the allopa- 
 thized sick, for example, were longer laid up than 
 others ; and whether bled and calomelized persons 
 were soon on the sick list again, or the contrary. 
 Details might also be invited, especially from the 
 benevolent clergy, of outlying districts and hamlets, 
 where doctors are few ; and above all, of any remote 
 oases where there are none at all : details respecting 
 the longevity of the population there : whether the 
 poor people crumble away rapidly in the absence of 
 allopathic cement; or whether there is still a trace of 
 that sturdiness that marks the English yeoman, and 
 even occasional instances in those drear localities of 
 silver-haired grandsires on the old bench under the 
 grandeval oak-tree at even, surrounded by their 
 children's children, all laughing with merry teeth, 
 jocund faces, and spirit eyes. It is impossible to 
 state what would be the answ^er of the public to the 
 enquiry ; but the putting of the questions would 
 cause a great deal of medical thought, and true sani- 
 
HOMOEOPATHY CALLS WITNESSES. 61 
 
 tary spirit in the population, and if it did probe 
 painful spots, and sometimes renew agonies of vain 
 regret, and bitter feelings, it would still be whole- 
 some for future, and above all, for Parliamentary 
 guidance. And for these reasons I do not see how 
 such a commission can properly fail to have the 
 powerful advocacy of Mr. Brady. 
 
 Should Mr. Brady be chairman of the committee. 
 I would hint into his most private ear, that he may 
 gain some credit, and elicit facts, by calling to the 
 table-edge some of the dentists in large practice in 
 the metropolis, or in Dublin. Let him ask them to 
 prepare for him a statement of what they know by 
 experience about the effects of medical treatment 
 upon the teeth, and hence upon the powers of masti- 
 cation and digestion ; whether the drug system stands 
 in any defined relation to caries ; and whether, upon 
 the whole, they regard Allopathy as particularly 
 favorable as a universal means of cure, to the pearls 
 of the woman^s mouth, or the ivory array of the 
 man^s. And just for the sake of science, let him 
 summon the actuaries of a few great insurance of- 
 fices, to ask them whether any preference exists for 
 taking the policies of Allopathic over Homoeopathic 
 patients ; or which way the matter runs. It is ob- 
 vious that the questions are somewhat new, and could 
 hardly be answered offhand; but notice might be 
 given ; printed lists of queries sent round, and even 
 inserted by public advertisement in the journals ; and 
 in a little time, facts would begin to arrange them- 
 selves round each query, and a well-stored body of 
 witnesses would come down to Westminster to Mr. 
 Brady. 
 
62 THE MlXISTllY OF HEALTH. 
 
 It will be better to manage the matter thus quietly, 
 at a green-covered board in the rooms of one of 
 the long corridors of the new houses, with a few 
 pacific gentlemen, and Mr. Brady, speaking all in 
 unexcited voices, and the whole falling straightway 
 into inevitable short-hand, to germinate and grow 
 into the thickest of the folio blue books, which only 
 a few heroic men guiding public opinion will master, 
 rather than that so private a public question should 
 go at once, like the Corn Laws, to monster meetings, 
 and perhaps to the boards of Covent Garden out of 
 the musical season. For many reasons I should de- 
 precate a direct appeal to the feelings of my Coun- 
 trymen on the bleeding and drugging system. Only 
 suppose a Homoeopathic Cobden and Bright appeal- 
 ing from an unwilling and deaf Parliament to the 
 mass of the nation, and instead of providing ample 
 accommodation for tenant farmers, holding out invi- 
 tation and room for ruined patients ; and what wild 
 passions might not such dangerous fellows evoke, 
 what pangs might they not parade, what real Stygian 
 shadows might they not cause to shuffle and almost 
 to flit before the bleached audience? We might 
 easily have no-physic riots. It might be a part of 
 their tactics, that after the Homoeopathic Cobden 
 with the trenchancy of English sense had carried the 
 theatre with him so far, some haggard wretch lately 
 trebly bled should speak, and the eloquence of his 
 one pale sentence in faint whine would be terror. 
 Then the fiery Homoeopathic Bright would fulmine, 
 and he also w^ould announce on sitting down, that he 
 had the satisfaction of introducing another patient : 
 when straightway a throatless grave-bird with swelled 
 
AGITATION NOT GOOD. 63 
 
 chaps of dough, begins and ends his swampy croak 
 with " the calomel cure/^ The easiness of this kind 
 of eloquence would be shocking ; those that were 
 most unaccustomed to public speaking would carry 
 the audience the farthest : blanched and skeleton 
 children would have an effect quite disproportioned 
 to their weight and color. The coming together of 
 the patients for such a purpose would be a great in- 
 expediency : flocking to a hospital, and shut in mass 
 in its receiving-rooms, they are all going to secundum 
 artem ; but here they are going to criticism, to com- 
 plaint, to anger, and inevitable passion. And re- 
 member that our new agitators would fly from town 
 to town, placarding, exciting, pathogogizing, printing 
 tracts, collecting subscriptions, publishing the Anti- 
 drug League, with the Anti - bleeding Supplement : 
 rearing a formidable head in the Legislature itself, 
 and finally causing some Allopathic prime minister 
 to apostatize during the next invasion of cholera, and 
 overthrow terra firma under both parties in the houses. 
 For this reason it will be better for Parliament to 
 manage the case itself, never to let it lapse below the 
 stateliness of a committee, and the cold largeness of 
 a Blue Book, but to collect evidence in a still room of 
 the long corridor, and then proceed to shut up Allo- 
 pathy by direct and clenching legislation. 
 
 As was the case with the Anti- Slavery Bill, it will 
 be an important point for consideration whether the 
 abolition of old physic shall be immediate, or gradual. 
 On this subject I should indeed be sorry to prejudge 
 and forestall the wisdom of Parliament. Yet I in- 
 cline for many reasons to suspect that the advocates 
 of immediacy will have the best of it. A principal 
 
G4 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 ground is, that after the committee has concluded its 
 labors, Allopathy, from what has been proved of it, 
 will be so thoroughly suspect, that every death which 
 takes place under it must necessarily become the sub- 
 ject of an inquest. And putting decease by old age 
 out of the question, I have received from an august 
 authority a calculation, that for London alone, in 
 ordinary times, the sifting of the Bills of ^Mortality 
 in that case will occupy for twelve hours a day, every 
 day in the year except Sundays, Forty Coroners and 
 nearly five hundred coroners' jurymen, besides several 
 hundred chemists and pathologists, and barristers 
 innumerable. Mr. Wakley will be able to inform 
 Parliament how inconvenient this will be, from the 
 experience which he has had in the one or two un- 
 successful inquests he held upon those who had died 
 in spite of homoeopathic treatment. It will therefore 
 be better, the immediate abolitionists will say, by 
 direct and merciful action, to prevent this unseemly 
 overhauling of the allopathic Morgue; which yet 
 must take place if any respite of years, or even 
 weeks, be injudiciously granted to the condemned 
 system. 
 
 Mr. Brady's committee will have sad work enough 
 in wading through these rank fields of grief and pain, 
 but their labors need not all be on sorrows, though 
 even then good hope would sustain them : but let 
 them for more reasons than one interpolate their 
 days of enquiry with investigations of a different 
 order. Out of contrast sight shines. Let them invite 
 evidence from the steady fathers and mothers of 
 families in which Homoeopathy has been practised for 
 years, and let them hear the condition of health in 
 
mothers' prospects look up. 65 
 
 those homes. Let them ask the parents whether the 
 series of their " children's diseases '' has indeed been 
 treated without a grain of the ordinary physic ; 
 whether teething has been accomplished without a 
 case of lanced gums; whether measles^ whooping 
 cough and scarlet fever have gone away again with- 
 out depletions and purgations : whether if the parents 
 are more recent converts to Homoeopathy, they have 
 noticed any bettering in the bodies of their little 
 flocks since its adoption ; whether in any cases chronic 
 eruptions, that had resisted old treatment, and got 
 worse under it, and inveterate inflammations of the 
 eyes, had yielded to homoeopathic doses ; whether 
 infants are less susceptible to these than fanciful 
 adults; whether the mental condition of their chil- 
 dren, and their sleep, which is the lake of which the 
 days' states are the river, have been more sweet and 
 even than when drugs were put into their bodies. 
 I would also privately instruct Mr. Brady to direct 
 some of his cleverest questions to the Manchester 
 side of the matter. How have the medical expenses 
 run ? Is it, or is it not, a fact, that in Allopathy 
 one heavy bill engenders another ; that the year's 
 charges for calomel and bleeding are succeeded by 
 the next year's heavier charges ; and that in this way, 
 after the Napoleonic maxim, w^ar supports war : but 
 that in Homoeopathy, on the other hand, much cost 
 is indeed incurred at first in parrying the eff'ects of 
 the old treatment left upon the system, in attacking 
 the maladies of nature, and in steadily combatting 
 constitutional predispositions ; but after the first in- 
 dispensable assiduity of attendance is past, the me- 
 dical expenses of the family become as a general rule 
 
6G THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 less and less, until at length many or the whole of its 
 members emerge from convalescence altogether, and 
 pass into the ranks of vigor and wholeness. AVhether, 
 in short, on the old system the doctor's bill in un- 
 healthy families does not generally increase time after 
 time ; and in the new system, decrease ? Whether 
 this, in conjunction with the diminished deaths under 
 Homoeopathy, the monetary gain to the community, 
 of citizens saved and funeral expenses saved, be, or be 
 not, a financial consideration of great importance in 
 the State? Mr. Cobden, who I hereby put upon the 
 committee to intensify the arithmetic of Mr. Brady, 
 will do good service in extracting the marrow of this 
 kind of questions. 
 
 I also regard the evidence of nurses as of much 
 moment in determining the length of the days of Al- 
 lopathy. Good nursing is a good part of the battle 
 of Cm'e. Now nurses may be easily summoned by 
 Mr. Brady, who are accustomed to attend to both 
 kinds of patients — the homoeopathic and the other : 
 and it will be edifying to hear from their unscientific 
 lips what they have experienced of the two systems. 
 Are the allopathic means a serious addition to the in- 
 evitable distresses of the sick room ; is its service dirty 
 and disgusting to perform ? Are blisters on children 
 sad things to dress in the absence of the doctor ? Is 
 leeching a hard office, and are leechbites apt to bleed 
 too much, and to overdo the blood-cure ? Is the ad- 
 ministration of bolus, piU and potion a thing they 
 would gladly get rid of, or the reverse ; and are the 
 discharges provoked by these drenches more uncleanly 
 than disease would have been without them? Is 
 there a large proportion of cases in which the excess 
 
NURSES IN THE WITNESS BOX. 67 
 
 of drugging and violent means generally, revolts the 
 patients and their friends_, and causes them to try a 
 different mode of treatment? In childbirth, also, 
 have they any contrasted experience bearing upon the 
 labors of the committee? Are women, after their 
 hour of sorrow, relieved of the consequences of na- 
 ture's struggle by the homoeopathic arnica, and is 
 the number of cases of puerperal fever small in such 
 patients ? Are they better from the omission of the 
 routine purge on the third day, with which the Allo- 
 paths assist nature, who would rather be left alone in 
 that quiet-wanting time? Is the quantity and qua- 
 lity of the mother's milk better when she is not 
 drugged ; and have they any facts to give, in their 
 rough way, of the difference in the state of mother 
 and child under the two systems ? I think Mr. Brady 
 will find the evidence of experienced and respectable 
 nurses of great importance. 
 
 The fact is, that nurses have a great many things 
 put upon them, which either ought to be undone or 
 the doctors ought to do them for themselves. Many 
 a medicine given to children is so chokingly horrible 
 that a medical practitioner ought to be present to 
 count the pulse and to watch the countenance during 
 its administration; just as is properly the case at a 
 military flogging. In my old days I have seen a 
 nurse resign the trembling spoon or cup to the doctor, 
 and say in the boldness of humane terror, " Sir, give 
 it yourself.'' My own conversion to homoeopathy 
 was attended with one of these ' experiences. Our 
 eldest child, a baby then, was attacked in the night 
 with a sudden bronchitis, attended with great wheez- 
 ing and oppression. My wife and I sat on end in bed 
 
68 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 in sanitary conjugal quorum. I ordered ipecacuanha 
 wine as an emetic, and I went clown stairs to the sur- 
 gery and fetched it. There it stood by the bedside, 
 and the question was, who should give it ? My wife 
 said nothing, and I broke a short silence by observ- 
 ing that the medicine was there. She then said, 
 " Well V and another silence ensued. I too now 
 said, " Well !" and again we were silent. At length 
 Mrs. W. said, "What are you going to do?" I said, 
 *' What are you going to do V She said she was not 
 going to give the child that medicine. I felt indig- 
 nant in all my professional frame, and I told her that 
 the ordering of medicine was the doctor^s department, 
 that it was the business of mothers and nurses to give 
 it. She replied that I was not only doctor here, but 
 also father and nurse, and that I must do it, or it 
 would not be done ; and she added also, that she had 
 no faith in that stuff; and furthermore that she was 
 glad now that I had seen at home what burdens 
 were daily laid on parents and nurses when I went 
 away from house to house, leaving such things to be 
 transacted between my visits. I thought of the de- 
 nunciation in the Gospel against those who lay on 
 grievous burdens, which themselves will not touch 
 with one of their fingers ; and I could not but admire 
 her disobedience. But she did not stop here ; but 
 told me that for long (she had hinted this before) she 
 had felt a repugnance to all my practice, and that 
 this very occasion was sent?, partly to oblige me to 
 look into that new thing called Homoeopathy. The 
 upshot of the particular case was, that my wife gave 
 a piece of ipecacuanha, such as would pass through 
 the eye of a needle, to the child ; and a good and ho- 
 
A LADY^S CONTUMACY. 69 
 
 moeopathic remedy it was ; after which, the oppres- 
 sion of the breathing passed away. The circumstance 
 made an impression on my mind, and I now record 
 it, being sure as day that humble and simple as it is, 
 it will leave a mark upon the minds of mothers. 
 Think then, mothers, fathers and nurses, what a 
 blessing it is to you, to get rid at one blow of all 
 these difficult and painful duties which the old prac- 
 tice enjoins upon you ! I see your own health and 
 happiness mantle and rise as you look at your little 
 ones from the bare contemplation of so good a rid- 
 dance ? 
 
 But if the application of the old means be an in- 
 crease of evils in the private sick room, what is it 
 where the sick are congregated together in hospitals 
 and above all on shipboard. Aggregated masses of 
 disease are known to exert a baneful influence upon 
 each individual of the affected groups, and this must 
 be doubly the case where all means are taken to ag- 
 gravate the discharges that take place. In acute 
 cases, the whole vigor of the old system is directed 
 to forcing the morbid and morbific matters outwards, 
 while Homoeopathy gains its chief triumphs by the 
 extinction of the disease within the frame. Of com'se 
 therefore, the allopathic method spreads all the loath- 
 someness of maladies under the very senses. And 
 then, moreover, mark the difficulty of attending to 
 the artificially created wants of nature in confined 
 spaces. Supposing that measles breaks out in a ship 
 which has a large number of children on board, one 
 child must have an emetic for oppression of the 
 chest ; another, a blister for a more advanced case of 
 the same ; a third, leeches for pneumonia, with of 
 
70 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 course calomel every two or three hours : some too 
 must be Ijlcd, and each and all must be well purged 
 many times in the treatment of their cases. Is this 
 nothing, repeated thirty or fortyfold in the narrow, 
 stifly berths of a ship, where at best simply misery is 
 triumphant? What a different picture. Sir, and my 
 Countrymen ! is the homoeopathic treatment of this 
 same complaint. Put twenty drops of the tincture of 
 aconite, third dilution, quite tasteless of the aconite, 
 into a tumbler of water, and give a teaspoonful of it 
 every three hours to all those cases where there is 
 fever : put twenty drops of tincture oi Pulsatilla, third 
 dilution, similarly tasteless, into a tumbler of water, 
 and give a teaspoonful at intervals of five or six hours 
 to all those where there is but little fever, and the 
 eruption is well out. Leave all their tender bowels 
 to themselves, only don^t feed them too much. If 
 other symptoms arise, as pneumonia, don^t bleed, 
 don't purge, but give aconite and bryonia — similarly 
 tasteless, in alternation or succession : and so forth, 
 according to each case. How clean and easy is all 
 this, and God knows it is most efficacious. It is as 
 well done on shipboard as on land ; and then neither 
 in the medicaments nor in the results is the dirt of 
 physic added to the dirt of disease. If Parliament 
 and Mr. Brady regard the sanitary condition of our 
 emigrant ships as of public moment, I put this also 
 to the labors of the committee, as a matter well de- 
 serving their most earnest and Christian inquisition. 
 And if I have the ear of any intending emigrants, I 
 conjure them to go out in no ship without being pro- 
 vided with a homoeopathic chest, and a book of di- 
 rections for the treatment of simple diseases. And 
 
MEASLES DISMISSES OLD PHYSIC. 71 
 
 above all, I advise them to make constant enquiries 
 about tbe chartering of homoeopathic ships, which, 
 as many of the merchant princes of London are in 
 the homoeopathic ranks already, is a measure which, 
 with a little setting on foot, may be easily accom- 
 plished. 
 
 This brings me to the last part of my subject, 
 which concerns more particularly the so-called sani- 
 tary movement of the day ; and now. Sir Benjamin 
 Hall and my Countrymen, I feel that I am closeted 
 with you in an especial sense. For the present I leave 
 Parliament to itself, and Mr. Brady to himself; and 
 I shall be truly glad if I have not to call them in to 
 stimulate any of you in your independent functions. 
 If you will do what I dictate, by yourselves, you shall 
 have all the credit of it; for I guarantee that I will 
 tell nobody out of your private circle that I have been 
 the instigator. Sint sua prcBmia laudi. 
 
 Now first, Sir Benjamin, I beg to assure you, that 
 you are not presiding over a Board of Health at all 
 in a medical sense. You are the director of a mere 
 Board of Cleanliness ; the administrator of an edile- 
 ship ; a noble function ; that to a community, and a 
 town, or group of towns, which washing, scrubbing, 
 dusting, and putting refuse away, is to a private 
 house. The old medical profession has, it is true, 
 hoaxed you, after having hoaxed Parliament and Mr. 
 Brady, into the belief that you are a great medical 
 officer : but then on the face of it you have issued no 
 medical directions ; you have none such in the back- 
 ground; and all your brightest measm'es resolve 
 themselves at once into the enforcing of public clean- 
 liness. You will understand me better as I proceed ; 
 
72 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 but in the meantime let me say, that I honor you 
 extremely in your office, which I believe to ])e indis- 
 pensable, and the creation of it a master-proof that 
 civilization is advancing. 
 
 But, Sir Benjamin, while your board is to the 
 grand edifice of material England what the mistress 
 and her servitors of house-cleaning are to the private 
 dwelling, a Board of Health will be to the community 
 what the medical man is to the family. He can 
 never confine himself, when summoned to specific 
 cases, to exploring the kitchen, or supervising the 
 dusthole, which he expects to form part of the daily 
 work of the occupants ; though if anything peculiarly 
 offensive strikes him, he will of course point it out 
 to those whose business it was to have seen to it 
 without his criticism. But what he does is, to medi- 
 cate and diet his cases, certain distinct afflictions of 
 disease ; to prescribe the particularities of heat, cold, 
 light, air, which belong to those forms of sickness; 
 to speak of moral and mental treatment : and in short 
 to cure the existing maladies. Now just in the same 
 way, that compound doctor, the Board of Health, has 
 to take measures for the collective sickness ; although 
 any side suggestions he may have to make to your 
 Board of Cleanliness will of course be thankfully 
 received ; even if they somewhat reprove you for not 
 having mastered your own duties quite. " Dear me, 
 ma^am, there's a dreadful smell of cabbage-water 
 here !" would be a pretty blow from a medical atten- 
 dant to an English housewife who had a sick child in 
 bed in the room : and " Sir Benjamin, the drains of 
 Westminster are foul V' would no doubt grate upon 
 vou from the Board of Health. This would be pre- 
 
WHAT A BOARD OF HEALING IS AND DOES. 73 
 
 cisely because it would be your business that was thus 
 recalled to you by a foreign council. 
 
 The first business of a Board of Health, Sir Benja- 
 min, in 1854, or in any other year you please, lies in 
 issuing specific directions to the people of Great Bri- 
 tain and Ireland, for the treatment by them of the 
 early stages of any diseases that may be prevalent in 
 that or any other year. In every family there is such 
 a thing as domestic practice, a pennyworth of salts 
 for this, of paregoric for that, a little peppermint 
 water for wind, and a little magnesia for stomach- 
 aches. In Homoeopathy we have none of this; but 
 a wide range of household healers. Now the Board 
 of Health (recollect there is none now) is the mother 
 of Great Britain and Ireland in her administrations 
 of domestic preventions and remedies. It is obvi- 
 ously the public doctor also, for medicine and ma- 
 ternity are seen to be one, transfigured both on that 
 high mount of charity and use. 
 
 Thus, Sir Benjamin, it is the business of "the Board 
 of Health to seize upon the fact of the universal 
 domestic practice, and to edify and educate that prac- 
 tice to the furthest extent which the science of medi- 
 cine will allow, so that the first grappling of the 
 public with diseases may be as safe, sure and prompt 
 as may be. Each season has its own complaints, and 
 the labors of such a Board will be incessant, to pub- 
 lish in all convenient channels, first, the mode of pre- 
 vention and prophylaxis for the epidemy of the week 
 or the month ; and secondly, the best mode of treat- 
 ment in the first or domestic stages of the disorder. 
 This will be a grand education for the medical men 
 themselves, who will then for the first time become 
 
 E 
 
74 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 conscious of liow far they are quite clear iu their 
 views of simple disease, and simple treatment ; upon 
 the principle that you understand well that which you 
 can exactly convey to others. It will also give the 
 public a medical education of the greatest use to the 
 community, sharpening at once the appetite for 
 health, and the axe to be laid to the root of disease. 
 In this way again it will exert a most vital influence 
 on the medical profession. For it is a principle that 
 each calling is driven into elevation, just in propor- 
 tion as the whole community is imbued with the 
 spirit and knowledge of which the Professors are the 
 delegated guardians. Thus an educated audience 
 exacts and rears from its ranks refkied orators, in 
 whom the finish of the eloquence of the assembly is 
 brightly seen. A great agricultural people, if it have 
 chiefs in its own strong department, will force them 
 to be men who have no spitful of brute clods left in 
 their creed, but to whom all the ground is one manu- 
 factory of humane cultivation. An advancing indus- 
 trious race will demand of its stewards and overseers, 
 more and more brain work, and less and less fatigue, 
 as its busy wheels roll on. And so a Great Britain 
 and Ireland, medically educated in home remedies, 
 will, ex necessitate rei, drive up medicine and its col- 
 leges, into broader common sense, into greater atten- 
 tion to curative results, and into a wholesome fear of 
 the public as its court of last appeal, and ultimate 
 judge. It will then be a real distinction to be a suc- 
 cessful medical man, because the palm will have been 
 awarded by those who are instructed in the merits of 
 the case. The good doctors will be laudati a laudatis. 
 This however is an oblique result, although we may 
 
SPURS FOR DOCTORS. 75 
 
 easily see that the case will be so by what has already 
 happened in your own department^ from the labors of 
 your Board of Cleanliness. Even now you have talked 
 so much and so well with a hundred mouthpieces, 
 of the necessities of drainage,, sewage, omnipresent 
 water pipes for tow'ns ; the permeation of clear streams 
 of water through them at moderate cost ; the forma- 
 tion of parks; the forbidding of mural dunghills and 
 pigstyes ; and the satisfaction of many low needs with- 
 out which our highest social aspirations are abortive : 
 even now, I say, Sir Benjamin, you have so indoctri- 
 nated us all with these exigencies, that a new realm 
 of consciousness has been created in the people : they 
 take no sober* Sunday walk to Hampstead without 
 criticising ditches, mantled ponds and swampy low- 
 lands; they pass no gully hole without thinking 
 whether you are as good as your word there, or not ; 
 and in short they are in the temper to appreciate 
 what you have done, and to thank you for it, and to 
 force you, as you value your position, to do more and 
 more. Of course you rejoice in this, — to be carried 
 forward by your own clear will, and also whether you 
 will or no, at the head of these clean legions of your 
 countrymen. You are in the splendid position of 
 perfect necessity and perfect freedom. You must 
 scrub us harder, and bring us out whiter, every 
 month, or pay the piper. And now can you doubt 
 that when the healing consciousness has been de- 
 veloped by the Board of Health, as the cleaning 
 consciousness has been evoked by you, the medical 
 profession also will be a new and higher head to its 
 new population? At present, you know, the case is not 
 so : the old doctors tell as little as possible to anybody 
 
 E 2 
 
76 TUE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 else : they arc all wrapped up in long Greek cloaks 
 of tecliniealities, with black Latin dominoes and vizors 
 of prescriptions : it is difficult to judge of tlicm except 
 by kill or cure, which is too late : but let the public 
 light once get at them, let them sometimes at least 
 be dressed like other people, let them tell us for our 
 benefit what they know, and they shall willingly 
 march at the head of a force which has just confi- 
 dence in its leaders. When once they constitute a 
 Board of Health, and quit disguises, they will come 
 into medical daylight, and the people of Great Britain 
 and Ireland along with them. 
 
 I know they are timid of this, and their eyes but 
 little accustomed to the public sun : moreover they 
 are sadly, I will not say basely afraid of losing much 
 practice if they are only called in to difficult cases, 
 Avhen well skilled mothers find themselves at fault. 
 I never could participate in this fear, which if the 
 worst were to come to the worst, is a well of hope to 
 every honest man in the kingdom. The empire of 
 disease anywhere abridged, makes all men richer in 
 that locality. Changes from a great demand for an 
 article, to a small, take place gradually; there is 
 always warning enough for the wise : and the result 
 is most wholesome, inasmuch as enterprise is created 
 every time a new direction is given to skill, by the 
 cessation of an old demand, and the rising up of a 
 different one. I do indeed believe that when Homoeo- 
 pathy comes to be universal, and when the Board of 
 Health teaches the millions how to get all the good 
 out of it that the best knowledge will admit, fewer 
 doctors will be required, and those fewer will be 
 rather physicians with insight than men of routine 
 
OLD PHYSIC DREADS SKILFUL MOTHERS. 77 
 
 (for the mothers will easily have nearly all the rou- 
 tine); hut then in the social expansion which goes 
 along with this, how many new callings will come into 
 being ; what ready ways of making money there will 
 be when once honest enterprise grows more freely in 
 the human heart ; and how little will a loss of func- 
 tion be regretted by -vigorous men, when they see that 
 function admirably performed by fathers and mothers 
 in every house. There is something pusillanimous in 
 the wail I often hear from the medical practitioners : 
 " Oh ! dear, there is that shocking Mrs. Dunn who 
 is cutting the ground fi'om under my feet with her 
 abominable little Homoeopathic box.^' ^hy, my 
 man, you have no spirit, you are on no ground of your 
 own, or no such person could have interfered with 
 you. Hely upon it there is nothing less wholesome 
 to the morality of a profession, than to have a number 
 of idlers in its ranks, people who could be done with- 
 out, and do something else for the nation: such a 
 state of things rots a calling : it is like a mob of 
 Indian servants, one for the right boot and one for 
 the left, one for your pipe, one for each leg of your 
 three horses, one for your pocket-handkerchief and 
 one for your punkah : you become an illserved and 
 languid wretch yourself, and may w^ell envy any 
 English gentleman who eats, drinks, works, walks and 
 sleeps in the humblest self-dependence. 
 
 And now. Sir Benjamin, let me gird myself to the 
 task of giving you a specimen of the functions of the 
 coming Board of Health, which, however, as it does 
 not yet exist, must for this time be represented by 
 myself. The present is the very best moment for 
 exemplifying the case ; because, though medicine lies 
 
78 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 buried in thick niglit, war and pestilence lend ghastly 
 torches^ to display the want of public succour, by 
 lifting up for a fold or two the darkness which shrouds 
 the field of mortality and pain. 
 
 On the 14th of September, Sir Benjamin, the 
 British army, some 30,000 strong, landed on the 
 coast of the Crimea, and that night, being without 
 their tents, the whole force lay upon the ground ex- 
 posed to a drenching rain from sunset to sunrise. 
 The consequence, as The Times states it, was a great 
 increase in the maladies of the soldiers, and a large 
 number of fresh cases of cholera occurred. If a 
 Board of Health had been on that spot, in the general 
 orders issued from head quarters in the early morn- 
 ing, would have been comprised this short direction 
 to each man of the force: Take rhus toxicodendron. 
 This is because rhus has a specific effect in prevent- 
 ing the injurious consequences that come from 
 thorough wettings. I am not now speaking of a 
 notion, but of a matter as well known to us Homoeo- 
 pathists as the existence of the Bank of England. 
 Rhus does exert such a power. And I tell you that 
 it is a shameful want of humanity, and of State Eco- 
 nomy, not to adopt so simple a means of ensuring 
 some little immunity to the brave men who go out of 
 this land, in order to support its traditional grandeur, 
 and by the very reading of their sweet deeds heighten 
 the moral stature of every man who is left in it. 
 Each soldier in that army ought to have had in his 
 knapsack a small medicine case, taking up a few 
 square inches, and of insignificant cost; and then the 
 order. Take rhus, given by the ambulant Board of 
 Health, would have been executed in a moment. An 
 
HOMCEOPATHIC RHUS STOPS 30,000 COLDS. 79 
 
 army would have been prescribed for, and cared for, 
 and many a death, and still more illnesses prevented. 
 The same case, of thorough wetting, is stated to have 
 occurred to large masses of troops on the night before 
 the battle of Waterloo. What could the old practice 
 offer in such a case ? Why nothing at all, but to let 
 the men get dry again as they could. The calomel 
 pills and senna draughts with which they visit us at 
 home for colds, were impossible. Here then is in- 
 stance No. 1, in which Homoeopathy makes it pos- 
 sible for a Board of Health to issue most benign 
 instructions which can be carried out if necessary for 
 millions of patients at once ; and this, because it has 
 specific remedies on which all its members are agreed; 
 these, in so compact a shape that they can be kept 
 at hand whilst a waistcoat pocket is left ; and so effi- 
 cacious, that they will never fail to save a large per 
 centage of lives ; and so inoflPensive, that in no case 
 will they enfeeble those who use them. I say. Sir, 
 now, that Homoeopathy comes to you as a statesman, 
 knocks at the door of all the wisdom and humanity 
 that is in you, and beseeches you whether it is worth 
 a hearing : or whether your proud Board shall con- 
 tinue to omit its name from your reports. By hea- 
 ven. Sir Benjamin, for the sake of the hearts of those 
 who are brave and firm for me in that far land, and 
 for the hearts of wives and families they have left be- 
 hind them, this thing, this Homoeopathy, this medical 
 contempt, this God^s boon to the nations, with you, 
 or in spite of you, shall have a hearing. 
 
 Your medical colleagues will try to laugh me off", 
 and tell you they did not know of rhus in such a 
 connexion. Believe them there : they know of no 
 
80 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 single feasible way of issuing one instruction bearing 
 upon the public health. But neither they, nor you, 
 are the less to blame on that account. When once 
 you shut your eyes and heart against anything with- 
 out examining it, if that thing professes to be charged 
 with a message of healing, you must take the conse- 
 quences of all that is lost by such unhappy obstinacy; 
 and if the visitant who comes to you in humble guise 
 for the little bread and salt of your best entertain- 
 ment, happens to be an angel in rags, you have all 
 the guilt of shutting out the angel, though in that 
 moment of your blindness you only saw the rags. 
 " He," Sir Benjamin, '' who has done it unto the 
 least of these little ones, has done it unto Me." The 
 Law of England is at you here as much as the Gospel 
 of Christ. If a man in a drunken fit kills another, 
 the drunkenness is no plea of extenuation. Nor 
 when you and your medical circle committed your 
 first drunken act, of kicking out the modest person 
 of Homoeopathy, will any plea of ignorance save you. 
 At least you knew very well that you were not act- 
 ing like reasonable beings : you knew that you were 
 condemning before hearing, and it is no excuse that 
 you did not know what you were condemning. But 
 I will tell you that the angel against which you 
 slammed your door, had in his open hand, as a pre- 
 sent to you from the God of art and science, the 
 health of millions of millions. 
 
 In that same act, Sir Benjamin, you were also 
 sinning against the main experiences of this age. 
 For you know very well that the possessions that 
 endow our civilization now, and carry us in point of 
 the material arts immeasurably beyond the ancients. 
 
BOxVRD OF HEALTH IGNORES RHUS. 81 
 
 have each and all been received at first with the con- 
 tempt and laughter of those whom they came to 
 serve. All these great facts, one after another, have 
 been stigmatized as impossible. Should not this at 
 length have taught you to put aside " impossibility/^ 
 and betake yourself to humble learning and investi- 
 gation ? Are statesmen to be always like the dogs 
 and cats, who are the same in the year 1 as in the 
 year 50, repeating a continual lesson of public shame, 
 and incapable of instruction by experience ? Or will 
 they learn at length that unlikelihood and impossi- 
 bility are two of the chief liveries which the new gifts 
 and dispensations of Providence wear to sightless eyes 
 and unbelieving hearts ? 
 
 But we are now in the Crimea, Sir Benjamin, and 
 if your knees are not chattering with the cold you 
 have caught, as " you did not know of rhus toxico- 
 dendron,^' come on with me a few versts to the south 
 of the place of the first drenching. Lady Errol is 
 there, and if she is not afraid, of course you and I 
 are lions. It is the night of the 20th of September : 
 the plain in front of the River Alma, the rocks, 
 slopes, and heights beyond it, the plateau which 
 stretches away from the highlands, are covered with 
 wounded soldiers of many nations. They are covered 
 too with dead men, but let them rest, for they are 
 gone to a better Board of Health. Again, the work 
 of Great Britain has been done; again her sword 
 hilts in its bloody scabbard, double-knighted in that 
 day^s fight. I hear the clear approbation of the com- 
 mander, the answering shout of the victorious legions, 
 the various noise of our twenty-eight thousand ; and 
 also the groans of the wounded and dying : but I 
 
 E 3 
 
82 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 hear nothing which appears to emanate from the 
 medical staff. Busy sailors, rough as bears in guise, 
 but making their corny, tarry hands like Iambus fleeces 
 for the nonce, are doing all that gentle women can 
 do to remove the maimed creatures to their ships : 
 and assiduous surgeons are in the rear, extracting 
 Minie balls, and lopping limbs : but, again, in the 
 name of heaven, who minds us all, what general 
 orders has the medical staff to give to meet so general 
 and foreseen a disaster of wounds. " Oh ! Sir,^^ you 
 say, " can nothing be done ?" Yes, most surely. Sir 
 Benjamin, something might have been done, if you 
 and your circle had not turned your faces away from 
 Homoeopathy. Providence, Sir Benjamin, foreseeing 
 the strife of the human race, and that broken heads, 
 and pierced bodies, and shattered limbs would be as 
 regular a part of man^s history as any other diseases, 
 has sown upon His thousand mountains, a yellow 
 flowered plant called arnica, which is by Him com- 
 missioned with properties, to heal the wounds in- 
 flicted in battle, and to stay many of the sad effects 
 of violence upon the life of His quarrelsome children. 
 And had there existed one gentle Bishop of Health 
 in the British Government, each man of that noble 
 army would have had this arnica in his knapsack, 
 included in the little case I mentioned before ; or 
 perhaps put still more handily, in some side pocket 
 near his heart, in order that if he were struck do^vn 
 for his country, he might reach out his languid 
 fingers, and find that his country had thought of his 
 wounds before they were inflicted, and done its best 
 to stanch them. The general orders before the battle 
 would have contained these words : Take arnica if 
 
ARNICA TENDS WOUNDED THOUSANDS. 83 
 
 hurt. After the battle hundreds of men could be 
 served with it in a few minutes, if they were inca- 
 pable of taking it themselves; and mark this,, Sir 
 Benjamin, as a well known fact; those men who had 
 it would take comparatively little harm if left upon 
 the ground, as must inevitably be the case with many 
 after great shocks of armies. The Board of Health 
 must answer at the bar of Britain and of God, for 
 having neglected this easy and powerful means of 
 succoring wounded men.* True, "they did not 
 know of arnica;^^ but that again was because in their 
 pride they would not know of Homoeopathy. Here 
 then is instance No. 2, in which the old practice can 
 offer no shadow of a measure of public health in a 
 great public emergency ; and in which Homoeopathy 
 comes forward with the very thing which is wanted. 
 I told you you should hear something presently about 
 Hahnemann, and this is a little part of the some- 
 thing. 
 
 But, perhaps, you will tell me that I have torn 
 you to the Crimea somewhat rudely ; that you had 
 no business there ; but that a certain piece of warm 
 green baize is the place of your dominion ; and that 
 you have nothing to do with omissions and misfor- 
 tunes which happen 3,000 miles away. Sir Benjamin, 
 
 * Mr. Headland informs me that when the army was starting for 
 the East, he made an offer through a high personage, to the Govern- 
 ment, to furnish, at his own cost, any numher, say one thousand, of 
 small bottles of arnica, to be distributed among the common soldiers. 
 Many of the officers of the Fusileers provided themselves with this 
 grand wound-medicine. Mr. Headland's offer was taken no notice of. 
 It was hurJced by the medical authorities. Sometime there will be a 
 judgment on back parlors, and the trumpet psalm of that day will 
 contain the text : " The dark places of the earth ai-e full of crueUy." 
 
8i THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 you arc the accredited centre of the public health 
 department of these realms; and your influence as 
 such radiates throughout the circle of the British 
 dominions. Have you, or have you not, done your 
 best, to close all your avenues against the very name 
 and thought of Homoeopathy ? Are you not will- 
 ingly associated with a packed board of doctors at 
 which Homoeopathy is entirely unrepresented? If 
 this be so, then you have lent all your weight, which 
 is that of the highest health officer in this country, 
 positively Minister of Public Health, to a plan which 
 has choked out of public life all the fair offices which 
 Homoeopathy would have performed for our wounded 
 soldiers. But if you still plead not guilty, because 
 there is the distance of 3,000 miles between the cause 
 and the effect, between the comfortable head quarters 
 and green baize, and the gashed soldier^s bloody turf 
 by the River Alma, what then have you to say of the 
 cholera, which has been quite in Westminster ? 
 
 Sir Benjamin, you have had 12,000 cholera deaths 
 within the compass of your immediate throne, prin- 
 cipally in the heart of London. You had ample 
 notice that that enemy was advancing upon you in 
 broad lines from the European coasts. The time of 
 its arrival, and the strength of its assault, were fore- 
 told with something of scientific exactness. What 
 preventive measures did you and your Board take, 
 to meet the enemy ? Belonging as you do to a little 
 medical Bussia, you knuckled down to fate like 
 arrant INIenchikoffs. You wrote leaders in The Times 
 on pure water, drains, and town-decency, and en- 
 trenched yourselves in a most respectable recommen- 
 dation to the sweetest cleanliness. For the rest, if 
 
HOMCEOPATHY PREVENTS CHOLERA. 85 
 
 the plucky foe will land, he must, and if he will kill 
 our people, he must. The result is, Sir Benjamin, 
 that there are 12,000 cholera dead on your field, and 
 God only knows how many wounded — how many 
 convalescents who will never be busy men or w^omen 
 again in this world. I suppose you did not know of 
 a substance called cuprum (copper) administered in 
 Homoeopathic doses as a preventive against cholera ; 
 and I suppose you did not know of another substance 
 termed veratrurtij also similarly and complementarily 
 preventive. Had you and your medical grand chan- 
 cellery known enough of your professed business to 
 advert to these two gifts of God, a few thousand 
 slips of paper half as big as one of these pages, would 
 have saved you reams of printing about meteorology 
 and fungi, and the public would have blest your 
 name for cancelling the pestilence, or better still, 
 they would have thought little about either you or it, 
 and you would then have been more than content with 
 an inner blessing of satisfaction from the Great Phy- 
 sician of us all. But now I must tell you about 
 these preventives, to make you know them. A few 
 globules of Homoeopathic cuprum, Sir Benjamin, and 
 the like of veratrum, given alternately, — the copper 
 one morning on rising, and the veratrum the next, will 
 save a great portion of the population from attacks 
 of cholera, and those who still have the disease, will 
 take it far more mildly ; much as is the case with 
 vaccination as prophylactic against small pox. There 
 is abundant evidence to this effect. Not a man who 
 takes these substances in the Homoeopathic form, is 
 worsened or laid up for a moment by their adminis- 
 tration. He feels nothing bodily ; but then he does 
 
86 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 feel an immunity in his mind from the gripe of the 
 disease; and this alone is a signal safeguard against 
 its invasion. The first effect of the medicine is to 
 kill fear, wliich is a vast cause of cholera attacks at a 
 time when the disease is prevailing. As this is so, 
 think what you have done in giving the cold shoulder 
 to Homoeopathy ! 12,000 dead in London : 12,000 
 sailors and soldiers dead in the Black Sea and the 
 Baltic ! Is not this an affair of the State ? The de- 
 molition of myriads of civic arms ; a myriad hands 
 rotting away in a few nights from the sailor^ s cutlass 
 and the soldier's sword ! And then the families of 
 the dead ! And most marvellous of all, nothing pro- 
 posed or thought of by you and your Board, that had 
 not been tried, and its outer incapacity proved, in 
 many previous invasions of the same disorder ! And 
 yet more marvellous still, the only alleged preventive, 
 never so much as mentioned in your jaunty reports, 
 which are full of fine matters for British associa- 
 tions and abstract philosophers ! matters of the same 
 moment to to-day's panic - stricken and pestilence- 
 stricken, as Lord Rosse's researches among the 
 nebul?e, or Mr. Layard's explorations of the title 
 deeds in the cellars of Sennacherib. Sir, you are 
 costing the country a pretty penny, in disabled in- 
 dustry, and maimed and crippled expeditions, just 
 because you choose to live in the midst of a dense fog 
 and night of doctors, to whom Homoeopathy is ana- 
 thema maranatha. But let me here again point out 
 to you, that they had nothing to propose to meet the 
 case ; their science lay in opening the nation's bosom 
 to fate : and furthermore, that this Homoeopathy 
 you have flouted, is the only servant which the State 
 
BOARD OF HEALTH IGNORES HOMOEOPATHY. 87 
 
 has in face of the calamity, and for political as well 
 as all other reasons must come for adoption to the 
 Government of this country, either in spite of you, or 
 the reverse, just as you please. 
 
 And what did you and the packed Board do when 
 the cholera came? Why, you became, by self- 
 appointment. Clerk to the Fates, and registered each 
 snip of their scissors. The cut threads of life were 
 chronicled and tabulated, and a splendid directory of 
 dead men, a blue book of the last arrivals in the 
 other world, was your proudest achievement. All 
 this is admirable in itself, when regarded as a little 
 side-play of science, accompanying the performance 
 of your grave duties. You did it, and you ought to 
 have done it ; but you ought not to have left the 
 other thing undone. Here also you murdered Ho- 
 moeopathy ; you dashed the chalice out of the hand 
 of the healing angel ! If you had had any general 
 medical instructions to communicate, they would 
 surely have come forth at such a time; but like 
 Charles X., who was sparrow-shooting at St. Cloud 
 when he lost his throne and his Swiss in Paris, you 
 were out fungus-hunting when cholera was decimat- 
 ing your own subjects in London. The perfecting of 
 the cloaca maxima and all the little cloacae was still 
 your pet plan in the emergency ; and you thought 
 that if you could kill the smell of dead and dying 
 by chloride of lime, the unmannerly corse would no 
 longer come between the wind and your nobility. 
 You and The Times could go to your pillows well 
 after so great a sacrifice to the human conscience ! 
 I must however rouse you from your opium. 
 
88 THE MIXISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 I suppose you (11(1 not know of camphor^ given 
 according to homccopatliic directions in the first mo- 
 ments of cholera. It is not my professed object 
 here to instruct you or my other countrymen in the 
 treatment of this disease : my observations on that 
 head ai'c only incidental^ for the purpose of display- 
 ing for M'holesome and most charitable ends to you 
 and all^ the dereliction of you and the packed Board 
 in a national case of dire distress : also, to exhibit to 
 you in a small specimen what the labors of a Board 
 of Health shall be. Well then next time. Sir Benja- 
 min, this Board of Healing will order thirty drops of 
 satm'ated spirit of camphor to be put in half a tum- 
 bler of spring water, and a teaspoonful to be taken 
 every hour as soon as the diarrhoea commences, and 
 
 * It is well to be recorded that Napoleon III., Emperor by the 
 grace of God and the will of the French people, knows of camphor in 
 cholera. He has ordered from Headland's 500 bottles of camphor 
 tincture. As this might have been easily made in France, for camphor 
 and alcohol are articles httle adulterated, and easily mixed, it is to be 
 presumed that that sagacious and determined Emperor gave the order 
 to shew goodwill to Homoeopathy. \Ye read in the Pays of Oct. 25, 
 as one proof " of the deep solicitude felt by the Emperor and the 
 Government for the welfare of the Army," that " the Emperor has 
 sent to the General-in-Chief of the Army in the East, a considerable 
 number of small bottles containing a preservative against the cholera." 
 These are, without doubt. Headland's verj' camphor ; though the Pays 
 apparently dare not mention Homceopathy to ears polite. The Emperor 
 knows that ^Marshal St. Arnaud owed that lease of life which enabled 
 him to be at the Battle of the Alma, to the homoeopathic instrumen- 
 tality of Dr. Charge of Marseilles, into whose hands as a dying man the 
 Marshal went long ago. Homoeopathy set him up for a time ; but his 
 constitution was undermined, and he sank under the campaign in the 
 Crimea. His letters are published, in which he gives his unqualified 
 testimony in favor of Homoeopathy. 
 
HOMCEOPATHY CURES CHOLERA. 89 
 
 long before the doctor can arrive ; and to be taken 
 every half hour^ every ten, every five minutes, ac- 
 cording to the intensity of the symptoms. Let ab- 
 solute recumbency, and abstinence from food, be also 
 general orders. If the disorder increases after two 
 or three hours (two or three according to intensity), 
 mix twenty drops of tincture of veratrum, n. 3, in 
 one half tumbler of water : twenty drops of tincture 
 of arsenicum, n. 3, in another : and give a teaspoon- 
 ful of each alternately every half hour. Should the 
 patient be deathly cold, give in teaspoonfuls iced 
 water, or water as cold as can be had. Mix also at 
 the same time, in another half tumbler, twenty grains, 
 or as much as will lie on a farthing, of cuprum, tritu- 
 ration, n. 3 : and if cramps and convulsions are a 
 prominent symptom, give a teaspoonful of this when- 
 ever the pain seems most intolerable : keeping on 
 also with the other medicines. If death appears to 
 be setting in after these remedies have been admi- 
 nistered for some hours, don^t budge an inch in hope, 
 but give in the same way as the veratrum, carbo vege- 
 tabilis, tincture, n. 3; and in two hours, if no better, 
 alternate it with stramonium, tincture, n. 3. By the 
 time this has been done, the homoeopath will have 
 arrived, and in thousands of cases to patients rescued 
 from the grave. 
 
 Have you recommended or tried any of these 
 healers? No. Have they been tried on a great 
 scale by the homoeopaths, and are they fixed facts 
 now, and no experiments ? With a thousand tongues 
 from all climates. Yes, and again. Yes ! Minister 
 President of the health of Great Britain and Ireland, 
 grand educator of soundness of body to the most im- 
 
90 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 portant community now on earth, distributor of orders 
 for the general tacties of English, Scotch and Irish 
 in the face of pestilence and epidemics, I suppose you 
 did not know of these things ! Perhaps also you will 
 tell me that such general orders may indeed easily 
 be issued, but that the public will not carry them 
 out. At least, Sir Benjamin, you and the packed 
 Board have not tried. And besides it is your busi- 
 ness, or that of a Board of Health, whose name your 
 board of cleanliness usurps, to instruct the people in 
 the ways and means of keeping their bodies whole ;* 
 to chastise their apathy by your flagrant appeals ; 
 and by propagating examples of the success of your 
 measures, to win the nation to attend to your mani- 
 
 * Apropos of the medical education of the community, we shall find 
 that under Homoeopathy it begins with early childhood, and is con- 
 tinued throughout life. The little people of families in which our 
 simples are given, get to know easily and soon what has done them 
 good in their minor ailments, and the remedies thus learnt, and which 
 constantly accumulate, are indelibly stamped upon the memoiy. By 
 the time when such famihes settle in life, they have acquired an amount 
 of domestic medicine which is highly useful to them. I know by ex- 
 perience that this is the fact. Moreover in this way persons come to 
 be very exactly acquainted with those homceopathic medicines that 
 suit their particular constitutions. And when once careful and clever 
 mothers have seen then: cliildren's diseases treated, and have learnt the 
 successful medicines, (which I am always happy to tell them,) if those 
 diseases recur, they treat them themselves often with complete success. 
 Frequently I have seen bronchitis in children thus cured, in a manner 
 which I should have been proud to achieve in my much regretted allo- 
 pathic days. Nor do I apprehend danger from mothers' tampering 
 with disease beyond their skill ; this may be the case sometimes under 
 any system ; but the solicitude of mothers as a general rule sends them 
 quite soon enough to the doctors. Of course it is an obvious truth, 
 that when a medical man is once called in, he should take the reins, 
 and have no interference ; but his power of managing this depends upon 
 his own moral and medical standing. 
 
 J^ 
 
BOARD OF HEALTH IGNORES HOMOEOPATHY. 91 
 
 festoes. The Board of Health will have the same 
 career to run as a single good physician ; it is not to 
 whine because it has its own way to make ; the pa- 
 tients of course have little confidence at first : then a 
 cure comes : then a sunshine of confidence spreads 
 from it : then many cures, and the confidence be- 
 comes larger_, and at last national, and the attention 
 to every direction of the Board immediate. And if 
 there is to be compulsory vaccination, why not some- 
 thing of the same kind with regard to prophylactics 
 (preventives), and medicines for actual disease ? The 
 tax-gatherers might easily be made instrumental 
 here ; and the sting of their unpopularity be drawn : 
 the " great plague of London '^ might be made the 
 means of lessening its great pestilences. Why should 
 they not give slips of paper with directions something 
 like those I have detailed, which by their reiteration 
 might bite into the public mind ? Why not have 
 the directions printed on the very papers that demand 
 and receipt our imposts, that so some of the strength 
 taken out of the hand one way might be recovered to 
 it by anticipation in another? Horse-leeching the 
 people is not the only function of a Government : 
 you might have partly cancelled that severe portion 
 by the blessed office of giver of health. 
 
 With the British Army, which is under your 
 charge, for it sits under the shadow of your professed 
 medical influence, you have had a grand opportunity 
 of carrying out whatever I have described. When 
 that noble army embarked, there were a series of ca- 
 lamities known to you and the packed Board, which 
 were as sure to happen to the men as the courses of 
 nature are sure. I must take you to each of these, in 
 
 «^ 
 
92 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 order tliat you mav see what vou did when you ejaYe 
 Homoeopathy the go-by. The first ^vas sea-sickness 
 on a great scale^ and for a long duration. What 
 general direetions did you issue to meet this general 
 and inevitable mischief? You let the men get well 
 again, unaided, as soon as they could : they were left 
 to the laughter of unsick companions. Had you 
 chosen to know of Homoeopathy, the first use of the 
 small medicine-chest that each man of the force 
 would have had with him, would have been made 
 here. There would have been, before embarkation, 
 general orders to every man to take nux vomica, three 
 globules dry on the tongue, because this prepares the 
 nerves to resist the tossing of the sea. Next, when 
 all were on board, orders would have been given for 
 those who are not sea-sick to give their less fortunate 
 comrades in their intervals of comparative repose, 
 three globules of ipecacuanha, which is of course 
 homoeopathic to sickness. By a steady perseverance 
 in this plan for a few hours, a vast number of cases 
 would have ceased, and some of the men would have 
 taken their first lesson in administering medicine to 
 their fellows, and the sick would have received their 
 first confidence from its success. By this means. 
 Sir Benjamin, you would have established a footing, 
 many of our jolly fellows would begin to cease laugh- 
 ing at Homoeopathy, and you would gradually pave 
 the way for your practice. The soldiers and sailors 
 would believe in their globules with the same trust 
 which they have in their Minie balls. There would 
 of course be a residue of several obstinate cases for 
 the surgeons, which they would treat in the same 
 way, with cocculus, petroleum and tabacum, according 
 
HOMCEOPATHY CURES SEA-SICK ARMIES. 93 
 
 to circumstances and symptoms; ordering the com- 
 rades to administer these medicines also. By the 
 time you arrived in the Dardanelles, the whole ex- 
 peditionary force would have got the germ of a 
 soldier^s medical education, and the next steps would 
 be more easy. The number of doctor^s cases would 
 have been greatly diminished for the next long voy- 
 age, as a considerable proportion of the force would 
 now know well enough the whole routine of the 
 treatment of sea-sickness. Would they be worse 
 soldiers on that account, or less efficient servants of 
 her Majesty the Queen and the British nation ? I 
 opine what the answer will be fi'om her Majesty, and 
 from every man of us. 
 
 And now, Sir Benjamin, as health minister, had 
 this affair of sea-sickness nothing to do with your 
 department ? And tell me further, has any other 
 thing than Homoeopathy ever pretended to issue 
 general prescriptions for such a case ? If not, does 
 anything compete wdth it for the appointment of 
 state medicine ? I have indeed heard of the allo- 
 paths ordering blisters to the stomach in inveterate 
 cases, after the Pharmacopoeia had been adminis- 
 tered ; but how would this read in general orders ? 
 You know how it would read. I challenge the allo- 
 paths to make any manifesto for the occasion. Thej'' 
 will rightly smile at the bare thought of being the 
 depositories of so benign a power. 
 
 We are now together in Turkey, and our still un- 
 diminished 30,000 have a number of minor ailments 
 partly traceable to the climate, and partly to their 
 new conditions. These are more or less epidemic, 
 because like causes produce like effects when applied 
 
94 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 to laroje masses of men. The Board which is to be, 
 prescribes for them also in general orders, to the 
 great delight of the medical men, who have only the 
 residue of difficult cases to manage. For observe 
 that the army doctors, prejudice against Homoeopathy 
 apart, would be glad to have their practice thus 
 reduced to real doctors^ cases, while civilian doctors 
 at home dread such a curtailment. This, you note, 
 is a matter of pay. But I do not delay at this stage. 
 Let us go on to Varna, where the 30,000 are to be 
 exposed to fever. You are clairvoyant, Sir Benjamin ; 
 I no sooner mention the spot than you are there, just 
 like Mrs. Wagstaff, or Mr. Hammond's Emma ; you 
 see the men already struggling in the dim folds and 
 coils of vaporous fevers. A'VTiat did you do for this 
 general calamity, into which the brave 30,000 walked 
 as surely as if they bad waded into a Stygian river 
 which lay direct across their march ? You saw them 
 going in knee-deep : you knew that many would go 
 overhead. What did the Health Minister do ? They 
 had to go there, be it observed, and British soldiers, 
 and French soldiers, go through death as they ford 
 any other river. You did nothing ; and trammelled 
 with the packed allopathic Board, you could do no- 
 thing. If you had then been a clear King of Health, 
 higher in vigor by a whole head than the best among 
 us, and if you had had your staff of faithful healers 
 in all the armour of Homoeopathy around you, you 
 would have ordered bryonia alba, three globules^ 
 and rhus (our old friend), three globules, on each 
 alternate three hours, as a commencement to all those 
 who felt certain symptoms of indisposition. Thus 
 you would have lessened the number of doctors^ cases 
 
HOMCEOPATHY CURES FEVERS AND AGUES. 95 
 
 to such an extent that the regular staff of medical 
 men would have been quite competent to treat them; 
 and we should have saved very many lives, and have 
 heard less about the paucity of medical servants. 
 Alack ! the allopaths, who have no general directions 
 to give, were all about you : the Army and Navy 
 and State [Medicine, Homoeopathy, was again rudely 
 pushed away. It has, Sir Benjamin, been most trium- 
 phant against these fevers from the Mississippi to the 
 Ganges ; it has immeasurably beaten all the calomel 
 and all the quinine on their own fields ; it has robbed 
 and bearded death in many a swamp and jungle; 
 it has injured no constitution and retarded no con- 
 valescence ; yet it was not respectable enough, not to 
 the taste of the flunkey Times enough, to be allowed 
 to rescue our poor fellows on the morasses of the 
 Euxine. 
 
 Here then you lost another opportunity, not only 
 of saving life, but of building up what I must call for 
 want of happier English, military domestic medicine, 
 — words which involve rather a sad parody for the 
 homeless soldier. Perhaps you also lost the oppor- 
 tunity of treating and converting the Duke of Cam- 
 bridge and the Prince Napoleon, whose suffrage would 
 have counted beyond price with the troops when they 
 gave their loud voices for Homoeopathy. But let by- 
 gones be bygones ; only remember that we have fur- 
 thermore already found you equally in complete void- 
 ance of your Health ]\Iinistry, in the cholera on land 
 and at sea, in another perhaps heavier bout of sea- 
 sickness, in the drenching of the 14th of September, 
 and on the sanguinary field of the Alma. I wonder 
 how much your Imperial Allopathy has cost the coun- 
 
96 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 try by the 21st of December ! uliat we have paid old 
 Physic for the shrug of the shouklers "with which it 
 motioned Homoeopathy down stairs from the green 
 baize table. The beauty of Helen cost the Trojan 
 war, and the beauty of Allopathy well nigh cost us 
 the loss of the expedition to the Crimea ; for you 
 know very well that the blow of cholera nearly took 
 the wind out of our mighty armada. Are you, then, 
 not the Minister but the Czar of Health, that you 
 estimate men as so much carrion in the making? 
 Well, let that pass ; and let us hurry on to Balaklava. 
 Now I find you are excessively tired at the end of 
 that day^s march : hill, and rock, and steep descent, 
 swamp and forest, have told upon you ; and you are 
 footsore, and sore all over. So am I. So also are 
 myriads more. Now as you and the said myriads re- 
 quire prompt attention, what are the general orders 
 of the King of Health to his wearied subjects ? "What 
 is there that is perfectly harmless, easy to take with- 
 out any preparation, comprisable in a word at the 
 end of Lord Raglan's orders, and quite valid for the 
 bruises of fatigue ? Allopathy, art thou a dumb dog 
 when thy counsel is needed ? Canst thou not answer 
 one question of thine examination in general useful- 
 ness? Dost thou leave the bruised on the march to 
 get unbruised again as best they may ? And is the 
 Health Minister, thy master, dumb also ? The men 
 have to work hard to-morrow, as if they had not been 
 fagged down to-day ; and if thou canst take away the 
 concussion of the march, thou mayest advance by 
 some hours and days the siege of Sebastopol. But 
 thou art a deaf mute ; and I must do the voice for 
 thee. Let each man of the force take arnica again, 
 
ARNICA CURES THE MOIL OF FATIGUE. 97 
 
 and let him repeat it four times a day as long as his 
 severe toil lasts, which will be throughout the siege. 
 By this means, his extraordinary exertions will do 
 him less harm : if his feet are almost wounded with 
 marching, inflammation will be stopped at the begin- 
 ning; and if his hands are blistered by carrying sand- 
 bags, gabions, fascines, and helping heavy guns up, 
 the blister will be a common blister, and will go no 
 further. A host of ordinary cases will be cancelled by 
 this simple means : an army, two armies, will have 
 learnt the use of arnica and the ready way of making 
 the least of all the lesions of over fatigue : and what- 
 ever cases are over and above, the doctors, released 
 from a vast amount of work that no longer belongs to 
 them, can treat with rhus (a complement vulnerary 
 to arnica), and then after that the armies will have 
 learnt the use of rhus too, and can release the doctors 
 from another circle of cases. 
 
 Does this strike you as of any importance, Sir 
 Benjamin, or do you aid and abet The Times in bolt- 
 ing the door against it ? If so, what is your propo- 
 sition ? I see that the insufficiency of the medical 
 staff to meet the wants of the casualty-patients, is the 
 subject of beautiful leaders in the Leading Journal, 
 which will not lead the contributors to its fund to ex- 
 pend any of their £200 cheques upon arnica and 
 rhus. But here Homoeopathy has the small sharp 
 end of its wedge in, which shall be driven right home 
 into the biscuit heart of The Times. This dispropor- 
 tion between doctors and patients is an incurable fact 
 for it : the old system cannot mend it : Dr. Secundum 
 Artem must himself die before the matter can be set 
 right, for it originates in the impossibility under which 
 
 F 
 
98 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 Dr. S. A. lies, of issuing any general plan of treat- 
 ment. Medication by single speeifics is the only sal- 
 vation from it. The plan of the old system under a 
 similar case at home happening to an individual, 
 would consist in prescribing rest for some days : sa- 
 turnine lotions on legs laid up on chairs for swelled 
 feet ; purges for inflammatoiT symptoms : but this 
 plan is inapplicable here. The plan of Homoeopathy 
 is the same at Balaklava as it is in Westminster : take 
 arnica repeatedly, and use it externally if you can ; 
 if not, persevere with it internally. You will be on 
 parade for the morning gun, and if stiff, you will still 
 be safe ; and you will go cheerily on and about until 
 the fortress capitulates. 
 
 The fault then of your Board is, that it can give no 
 general orders, and can make no use whatever of the 
 brains of the troops to enable them to be its assistants 
 in the medical work ; in consequence of which the 
 soldiers are medically just as little informed of their 
 part at the end of a campaign or twenty campaigns, 
 as they were when they left the Waterloo Bridge Sta- 
 tion. They say that a man is either a fool or a phy- 
 sician at forty, but the poor trooper, if he attained 
 the age of IMethusaleh, would on your present way 
 of dealing be a medical fool as long as he lives. A 
 strange Russian jealousy this, in the old system : it 
 can^t attend the people when struck down with the 
 spiked truncheon of the accidents of war ; and it wont 
 teach them to help themselves. The dog in the man- 
 ger, rampant, shall be the arms of the packed Board 
 from henceforth. 
 
 But this jealousy has another ramification : it op- 
 poses the employment of many instructed assistants 
 
OLD PHYSIC can't GIVE GENERAL ORDERS. 99 
 
 of both sexes who are not decked with a medical di- 
 ploma. Considering that the diploma people have 
 done nothing in the way of general orders and mani- 
 festoes of health and healing, and that 12_,000 deaths 
 in the Black Sea by pestilence are the result, I really 
 cannot see the danger of allowing irregular practi- 
 tioners to intervene.* The irregularity of a smaller 
 mortality might have come of it : a new turn might 
 have been given to the statistics. There is not surely 
 on this earth a man so brazen (out of the immediate 
 vicinity of Printing House Square) as to affirm or 
 even to surmise that more could have died. 
 
 I propose then, Sir Benjamin, to open the gates of 
 physic somewhat, and to have non-commissioned offi- 
 cers of healing, and rank and file of healing. Let 
 them consist of volunteers, of whom many thousands 
 will forthcome. Let them all be provided with ho- 
 moeopathic cases, a little more ample than those which 
 the soldiers possess; and let it be a part of their 
 
 * Hear -what Dr. Elliotsox says in The Zoist about this balance 
 of evils. " When a doctor is called in, his doings may be extremely 
 hazardous and fraught with the possibihty of unmitigated evil. He may 
 bleed, and physic, and mercurialize, and insist upon low diet, and give 
 stuporifics when he ought to do none of these things, and may cause 
 the patient to grow ten times worse and, at last, to die. He may give 
 meat, strong soup, wine, brandy, or porter when these are all pernicious. 
 He may give bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter : and moreover may 
 torment the patient, perhaps a little innocent sensitive child, with use- 
 less blisters, moxas, issues, setons, fiery liniments, incessant nauseous 
 draughts, and cruelly harass the poor creature who is unfortunately in 
 his power through poverty, or, as is very common among all ranks, 
 through ignorance of his incapacity, — an ignorance which renders in- 
 numerable patients infatuated with the grossest blockheads who were 
 ever licensed to practise and do mischief ' imjnme per totam terram.' 
 Such objections are absolute twaddle." 
 
 f2 
 
100 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 a^eenient that they will faithfully inform themselves 
 on a few general points of treatment which the Minis- 
 try of Health will direet : that is to say_, the first 
 things to be done for cholera, fever, seasickness, in- 
 fluenza, over fatigue, wounds ; and so forth. This 
 will be easy to them. For I beg you to remark, that 
 in Homoeopathy the practice of healing to this extent 
 is an exceedingly simple matter ; to the last degree 
 unmysterious ; in short, there is hardly an old lady 
 in Christendom of average understanding, who can- 
 not be very serviceable in it. Thousands of families 
 already manage thus much at home ; and with the 
 instructions of the Ministry of Health daily given 
 them in Lord Raglan's shortest sentences, they will 
 do it even better in the Crimea. On the old plan, 
 the practice in such a case cannot indeed be said to 
 be difficult, because it is flatly impossible, and even 
 un thought of. But then the new. Sir Benjamin, is 
 the creature of a different hope and day, and belongs 
 to the realm of a more practical sun ! 
 
 But then the doctors shiver out, " Only think of 
 the body of quacks and irregulars that will be let 
 loose upon the community when the army, with its 
 impedimenta, comes home again : we shall be pushed 
 from our stools.^' What then? If you all die out, 
 not more than 65 per cent., or 12,000 in gross in 
 London, will die of cholera on its next visitation. I 
 see no danger impending, which has not been im- 
 pending and striking for long ages. But then they 
 shiver out again, " Only think of having as competi- 
 tors the conceited nurses of the Crimea, — flushed with 
 victory over wounds and pestilences, — popular as wo- 
 men alone, and good and brave women, can be, — the 
 
HOMOEOPATHY CAN GIVE GENERAL ORDERS. 101 
 
 centres of listening circles, — the admirations and ora- 
 cles of tea tables ; we shall not have a chance, even 
 had we diplomas from all colleges, against these me- 
 dical Amazonians/^ There is some reason in this ob- 
 jection, which points indeed to a new state of things. 
 In the Battle of the Alma, a certain Russian genei^l 
 officer was captured by troops of the Guards, and he 
 is said to have informed his captors that he could put 
 up with that fate, but could not so well have borne to 
 be made prisoner by those petticoats, meaning the 
 Highlanders. He did not know what hearts beat un- 
 der Scotch plaid, or what steel sinews Highland pet- 
 ticoats cover. And the medical Russians of this 
 country are just as much out with regard to petti- 
 coats generally. They have no idea what woman can 
 do with her round arm of healing. Woman, Sir 
 Benjamin, in this country, is the pillar of Homoeo- 
 pathy : she first saw the horrors of the old system in 
 her own nursery among her loved ones : she first has 
 experienced the blessings of the new. It was she that 
 emancipated the slave : it will be she that ultimately 
 rescues the Briton from the crooked and venomous 
 darts of physic. She will then enter upon one of her 
 own callings from which she has too long been ex- 
 cluded. In all respects one half of medical practice 
 belongs to Homoeopathic woman. Only note her 
 qualities. The first of these is intuition, the bird's 
 eye of her ever busy love. With this she marks 
 symptoms and bodily states in those she sincerely 
 tends, with such an anticipation of correctness as no 
 physician can safely disallow. Were this intuition 
 fixed and educated, it would readily pass into stable 
 medical insight. Her fine senses animated by this, 
 
102 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 might soon eclipse the corresponding organism in the 
 man in several fields of diagnosis. Take the diseases 
 of the heart and lungs, and I have no hesitation in 
 affirming that the woman's educated ear might carry 
 the knowledge of these as matters of hearing far be- 
 yond the point at which it at present stands. She 
 might be taught all matters of common diagnosis in 
 these complaints with great rapidity ; and I believe a 
 time is at hand when all good mothers will know 
 them. As to practice, Homoeopathy has distinctly 
 opened it to woman. So united are all God's gifts, 
 so much do they converge to one another and to 
 higher principles common to them all, that this man 
 Hahnemann, without having that end in view, has 
 done more than any one else perhaps towards the 
 emancipation of woman, by providing her with a field 
 of the most humane and artistic usefulness, in which 
 her beautiful powers can expand. It is a great thing 
 for anything when new blood comes into it ; and the 
 newer the blood the less bounded is the hope. What 
 then may we not augur for medicine when an entire 
 better half is added to it ; when the Lady Hygeia is 
 really in practice. I should expect at least a set of 
 observations quite novel in their nicety, and of reme- 
 dial touches delicate beyond compare. The appear- 
 ance of woman upon the world's stage as a healer be- 
 longs to the present hour, and in its breadth was 
 impossible before Homoeopathy came. She can have 
 no material function T\ith old physic, which shuts 
 itself up in the frowning walls of dead languages and 
 rank male diplomas. Providence has kept her hands 
 white of it until this time ; and in those pure hands 
 she now receives from Him a principle of guidance 
 
WOMAN AND HOMGEOPATHY. 103 
 
 and a set of remedies that will not soil them. The 
 keen end of this wedge also is in^ and it will be driven 
 home. War and pestilence are the Thorns hammers 
 that will send it into the core of physic. 
 
 Was ever common sense more clear than that women 
 are the proper nurses for wounded soldiers? Why 
 they should have been excluded beats all reasonable 
 conjecture. The ladies of Antwerp and Brussels min- 
 istered to thousands of such after the Battle of Wa- 
 terloo. Women, by their patient virtues and powers 
 of endurance, are quite competent to follow an army 
 in the field ; they always stood as a second array at 
 the back of the old Teutonic hosts ; nay, in disorderly 
 crowds they have followed all armies since wars were 
 made. Why should they not now follow in well- 
 appointed bands of charity ? And for another thing, 
 why should they not be instructed in homoeopathic 
 medicine, receive certificates of competency so far, 
 take more and more work from the overburdened 
 shoulders of the medical man, and emancipate the 
 attention of the doctors for the worst cases and the 
 most dangerous casualties ? Because the doctors are 
 timid of bringing such rivals into the field afterwards ? 
 At any rate, by shutting out the other sex from a 
 participation in their labors, they have taken so much 
 upon themselves that the work is not performed at 
 all, according to the unanimous testimony of all im- 
 partial eyewitnesses. It appears then, that of neces- 
 sity laymen must come in, women must come in ; and 
 to make the best of both these newly enfranchised 
 classes. Homoeopathy must come in, and teach what to 
 do, and how to do it. This is God^s wedge of Fate. 
 This reform has many nuclei, — little centres from 
 
104 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 which the newness is growing, nor perhaps will it end 
 until Doctresses arc properly seated in all our large 
 communities. A beginning has been made in the 
 United States, and by two high-minded English la- 
 dies, who have each passed through an entire curri- 
 culum of medical studies, and taken doctors' degrees. 
 I allude to Doctor Elizabeth and Doctor Emily Black- 
 well, both of whom I have the honor of knowing 
 personally. From Dr. Elizabeth Blaekwell I received 
 the affecting tale of her struggle. Before I had the 
 pleasure of meeting her, I was accustomed to smile 
 at the notion of female physicians, and I was imbued 
 with the prejudice, that the art of healing was not in- 
 tended for women. But when I met her, I received 
 the confutation of my hypothesis ; and I saw at once 
 that where one such lady could exist, two could exist, 
 and in short that she was the model and the prophecy 
 of medical ladies. She is now in practice in New 
 York, — not, I grieve to say, a Homoeopathist ; but 
 I am thankful for her as a presence in medicine at all. 
 She told me that she had long determined to open 
 medicine to her sex, and to recognize no difficulties 
 but as they came. She applied to various colleges 
 for permission to attend the courses of lectures, but 
 always with the result of polite refusal. At last a 
 college in Philadelphia opened to her solicitation. 
 The day on which she was to take her place in the 
 class, the Professor told his students that a lady was 
 about to join their ranks, and he hoped well of them 
 for her sake and for their own. There she continued, 
 assiduous in all departments ; she did her part in the 
 dissecting room like the rest, only, I have no doubt, 
 with a grave and reverent perseverance that was diffi- 
 
DOCTOR ELIZABETH BLACKWELL. 
 
 105 
 
 cult to equal ; and at last she went up for her exami- 
 nation, passed it, and took her degree. When she 
 left college, the Professor again addressed his class ; 
 he acknowledged that his admonitions had been hon- 
 orably fulfilled, and that never before had he known 
 mthin those walls so thorough an obedience to deco- 
 rum. And he added that for this cause, he should 
 always be glad if he could have such ladies among 
 them. Imagine, Sir Benjamin, what a threatening 
 filmy mob of Times papers and nickering Punches 
 such a woman as that walked through without know- 
 ing it, with her quick unswerving resolution. I think 
 you will admit she might have nerve on a medical 
 emergency, and be entitled to prescribe with a cool 
 head what she had learnt with so much labor, and 
 was bent to practise with so powerful a volition. 
 And there are many others of the same sort both in 
 England and America, though they have not yet had 
 breathing room to come forth. I know that excel- 
 lent ladies will say, '' I should not like to study medi- 
 cine in that fashion. ^^ But then Doctor Elizabeth 
 Blackwell did like it, and did determine it : and it is 
 only those who so like and so determine that will be 
 evoked in such a character by the new wants of the 
 world. People are born for such gigantic works as 
 these : Hygeice nascuntur, non fiunt ; and all we have 
 to do is simple free trade over again. Let them try 
 their strength, and have their chance : if female phy- 
 sicians are a mistake against nature, they will come 
 to nought. If they are a true function, do not let 
 us throw one pebble of our unfair and ungallant hin- 
 drance in the rough path of their trial. 
 
 For my part. Sir Benjamin, I do not think they 
 
 r3 
 
106 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 will come to nought ; and I have adduced this case, 
 ])ecause it forms a kind of head and front to all I 
 have been dwcllin"^ upon about the imparting of 
 medical knowledge to new classes of the people. The 
 entire realm of practising mothers, of nurses, of sisters 
 of charity of all descriptions, will have its fountain 
 of honor, and well-head of information, from educated 
 accredited women of scientific talent and real profes- 
 sional standing. And therefore, though the matter 
 be still a little in the future, I thought that j^ou, as 
 Health ^Minister, might as well keep it in your eye, 
 and have a slight inkling about it. The medical 
 colleges here have too long been accustomed to be 
 called old women : it would be a pleasant change for 
 them, if some score of silvery voices from their num- 
 ber could tell the public that they are young ones. 
 
 But to return for a moment to the practical subject 
 of nurses for our armies, I would remark that the 
 great omission in the conception of the office, as an 
 institution, appears to me possibly to lie in not fairly 
 developing what I will call the female side of armies. 
 It is only contemplated to form the lower tiers of 
 that needful service, and of course a large cortege of 
 women who are exempted from the moral tone of the 
 higher members of their own sex, will be very likely 
 to fall into temptations, just as would be the case if 
 there were no heads, no ladies among them, to guide, 
 advise and preserve them, here at home. The remedy 
 lies in inviting patriotic ladies into the field. I mean 
 it literally. There are plenty of officers' wives, plenty 
 of Lady Errols, now mouldering for want of a func- 
 tion, who would answer this call ; and whose chaste 
 presence and womanly dignity would protect the 
 
THE LADIES IX THE FIELD. 107 
 
 female legion_, and make it available for medical ser- 
 vice. The sisters of charity are protected by the 
 sanctity of religion ; why should that be absent from 
 our bands of devoted ladies ? The Teutonic institu- 
 tion only wants bringing up to the mark of the age, 
 to be the thing still for the succor of the wounded 
 Anglo-Saxon hosts. 
 
 False medical dignity must however come down to 
 an immense extent in carrying out this courage- 
 ously. The ladies must be fairly at the head of their 
 own departments. The gap between the aristocrats 
 and the serfs in our medical Russia,, between the 
 diploma doctors and the poor nurses, must be filled 
 up by an independent middle class of healers with an 
 acknowledged charter of their own. This is a plenary 
 revolution, but it must be accomplished. 
 
 If there were no other reason. Sir Benjamin, for 
 the commissioning of ladies and subordinate females 
 in this crying hour, you would find a strong one in 
 the extreme difficulty you will, I fear, experience, in 
 procuring the required number of Homoeopathic sur- 
 geons. You and the country will now find to grievous 
 cost what The Lancet, The Times, and The Athenceum 
 have been doing for years past, in discouraging all 
 knowledge of Homoeopathy among the medical men, 
 and in browbeating those who were determined to 
 inform themselves about it. They have been only too 
 successful, and now, when you want Homoeopaths to 
 rescue the men from the jaw of those casualties which 
 are summed up in the effects of war and pestilence, 
 you will find that nearly the entire Homoeopathic 
 corps in these Islands is already pre-engaged in the 
 ample services of private practice. In short, they are 
 
108 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 too few for the people at home. You must therefore 
 advertize far and wide, and take who you may ; any 
 will be better than the AUopathie ineapables, who sit 
 beside the active cholera, fumbling and tabulating, 
 Death's Statisticians. But probably you will be en- 
 abled to enlist several Homoeopaths from the Conti- 
 nent of Europe. And you are to recollect, that each 
 of these will be serviceable for a far larger number 
 of patients than a single medical man can help under 
 the old plan. But the ladies will be a city of refuge 
 for you here ; for The Lancet, The Times, and The 
 Athenaum, have no whit frightened them from study- 
 ing the true art of healing in and for their own 
 circles. They go by facts and cures, and not by 
 orthodoxy. And this again is one more necessity by 
 which they press themselves into the public service. 
 
 Events, however, thicken in this direction before 
 my ink is dry. Doctor Blackwell is already but one 
 of a band of which Florence Nightingale is the Eng- 
 lish chief, and some of the best woman's blood in this 
 country is speeding to the field of war, to do woman's 
 work as it has not been done before since the days of 
 Jeanne d'Arc. I will not trust myself to think or to 
 feel while the Lord thus calls up his chosen into their 
 long empty places, lest the brain should be drowned 
 in the too great hour. Only I will say, it rejoices 
 me, that medicine, (call it nursing if you please, but 
 it will not stop there,) is the thing which has un- 
 chained the feet of woman, and cast away her Chinese 
 shoes. And as in sensual Judaea of old, the light of 
 this burning chastity springs forth in the land of the 
 Hareem. For the rest let me watch with reverent 
 amaze as Providence uncloses these doors, and shews 
 
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 109 
 
 me the aisles of hero women within, and the inter- 
 minable human whiteness of the future. 
 
 Before I quit the special subject of the army and 
 navy, I will advert to one great service which you 
 must hasten to do for all those who are in the ranks 
 of either. You know that the Briton, in theory, by 
 becoming a soldier does not cease to be a citizen. 
 Now the citizen at home can adopt Homoeopathy if 
 he pleases, without incurring any greater penalty than 
 the sneers and jeers of all the "regular practitioners^' 
 in his neighborhood. But the officer, and a fortiori the 
 common soldier, has no such freedom. The regimen- 
 tal surgeons have absolute power over him in this re- 
 spect. He can get no ticket of sick leave without their 
 active interference ; without their signature : and the 
 first question they ask him is. Whether he has taken 
 their medicine ? If he is a Homoeopathist, believing to 
 the core in the venomousness of old physic, he must 
 either lie, and say he has, which British officers will 
 not do, or else he must swallow the potions to qualify 
 himself for the proper answer. If he declines pill and 
 draught, he may not get his sick certificate, and is, 
 I understand, liable to be tried by court-martial. If 
 he is known to favor Homoeopathy, to have his chest 
 of globules, and thereby to keep himself out of the 
 hands of the army doctors as long as he can, he is a 
 marked man, and knows well what he has to expect 
 whenever necessity obliges him to hold official inter- 
 view with the regimental surgeon. We on this free 
 shore, who know what the conduct of the medical 
 profession is here to all who are suspected of Homoeo- 
 pathy, with what thorough disdain they are treated by 
 the men of diplomas, may easily form some slight 
 
110 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 conception of wliat the case and treatment may be, 
 ■where militar}^ sternness and complete power are 
 added to so much professional truculence^ and pa- 
 tients are under the shod heel of medical mercy. 
 The Homoeopathic officer is paid out in the Crimea 
 with a vengeance, for the freedom of opinion which 
 he dared to assert, and to commit to practice at home. 
 Can you imagine anything, Sir Benjamin, more de- 
 rogatory to the manliness of our gallant army, than 
 to be thus coerced by an old-womanish folly of sys- 
 tem, to swallow nausea in the same manner as used 
 to be the wont with poor little boys in the bad old 
 time ? Think of a bit of a doctor standing with his 
 foul cup, and spoon smeared with bolus, over a gene- 
 ral, and after threat after threat, exclaiming at him 
 with the look of a court-martial in his eye, " Will 
 you take it now ?^' And yet this happens every day 
 in substance. The army has got so far as that pro- 
 testants do not cram catholics, or vice versa, with 
 unpalatable doctrines; and why should Allopathy 
 pour its stuff down unwilling throats. Let there be 
 liberty in medicine, as in other matters of creed. At 
 least let the number of Homoeopaths in the force be 
 ascertained — His a vital point for future health — and 
 let the proportion between the medical men of the two 
 systems be regulated thereby. It is so already with 
 the clergy. If you will fairly see this point alone car- 
 ried out, you will have the thanks of both services, and 
 by placing them on a level with our citizens, you will 
 rescue them from the trammels of a disgusting slavery. 
 I am sure. Sir Benjamin, after the fever, the cho- 
 lera, the sickness, the drenching, the battle, the 
 march, and the siege, it has been a relief to you to 
 
DOCTOR smith's BEATITUDES. Ill 
 
 feel the soft hand of the ladies ; but we must now 
 accinge ourselves to other less agreeable considera- 
 tions. To day I received by chance The Morning 
 Post, and a side of it was occupied with a catalogue 
 headed, Medical and Surgical Stores for the Army. 
 It is from Dr. Smith, the Director General of the 
 Army and Ordnance Medical Department ; and The 
 Post hopes that '^his assurances will convince the 
 public that every necessary precaution has been taken 
 to alleviate, so far as circumstances permit, the suffer- 
 ings of those brave men who may unfortunately fall 
 in discharging their duty to the country.'^ Dr. 
 Smith also '^is happy in being able to state confi- 
 dently that the medical officers at Scutari have at 
 their command everything necessary to the treatment 
 of the wounded soldier ; hence there is no necessity 
 whatever for any effort being made by the public," 
 &c. Then follows the list of stores, something like 
 an index to the London Pharmacoi^ma, with vast 
 poundage assigned to many poisonous substances. 
 500 pounds weight of blistering plaster : 13 i pounds 
 of calomel; 150 pounds of contrite jalap; 1,570 
 pounds of castor oil : 30 pounds of contrite opium ; 
 100 pounds of colocynth pill, and 100 of blue pill : 
 150 pounds of Dover's powder : 250 pounds of lauda- 
 num, and 250 of tincture of rhubarb. This is taken 
 from the first list of stores. There are three lists. 
 In the third supply, sent out on the 15th of Septem- 
 ber, and which might be landed at Scutari about the 
 30th, ten days after the battle of the Alma, there is 
 an insertion of 5 pounds 2 ounces of tincture of arnica, 
 and it would appear that on the 24th of October, 
 another similar supply of arnica will be forwarded to 
 
112 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 Scutari. After my previous pages, Sir Benjamin, 
 you Avill know how to value Dr. Smitli's happiness, 
 and the Italic everything upon which it is founded. 
 !My ideas of everything and nothing are at this 
 moment passing through each other; for what the 
 Doctor calls everything, I call nothing ; and what he 
 implies as nothing, is for me everything. Arnica and 
 rhus are the first everything for the wounded man : 
 arnica has for ages merited and got the title, panacea 
 lapsorum : the all- cure of the fallen : 5 pints of arnica, 
 commanded and inserted in the third list by some 
 soul that loves its bleeding fellows, arrives at Scutari 
 ten day after the bloody fair. The list has no verat- 
 rmn, cuprum, dulcamara, or any of our simples that 
 save men^s lives. In one word. Homoeopathy has 
 not one line of its own on the huge broadsheet. One 
 battle has been fought. Sir Benjamin, and how many 
 are yet to fight ? Is Dr. Smithes empty everything 
 to be the limit that the Health Minister, that the 
 House of Commons, and that Her Most Gracious 
 Majesty prescribes as "all that is necessary to the 
 treatment of the wounded soldier.^' Then let the 
 bitter tears of friends and relations at home fall upon 
 that narrow cruel " everything .^^ The country, like 
 " Holy Russia,^^ practically leaves its fallen sons in 
 the rear, and hurries on to only brutal glories. 
 
 On the surgical side of the list thei^e are 109 cup- 
 ping instruments; 600 lancets; 100 blood porringers ! 
 We might have left this department, of shedding 
 British blood, to the Russians. 
 
 Now only think. Sir Benjamin, that all these grim 
 groceries might admirably have been left behind, to 
 the infinite benefit of both services, and the great 
 
OLD PHYSIC ASSISTS THE RUSSIANS. 113 
 
 discouragement of the holy Czar. I will not put 
 Mr. Urquhart on the scent, but it strikes me that if 
 he were to impeach you for being in Russian pay, he 
 might make out a very plausible case. 134 pounds 
 of calomel found on your person, you being in the 
 British camp, just before a great action ; and with 
 every presumption that you intended it, not for the 
 Muscovites, but for our troops ! 1,000 and odd 
 pounds of castor oil secreted about you in three sepa- 
 rate places, and more on its way into your possession : 
 and every reason to suppose that it again was for our 
 men. 100 pounds of blue pill also, and hundreds of 
 pounds of laudanum, in your pernicious wallet ! Talk 
 of poisoning wells. Sir Benjamin ; that is a trifle to 
 what the Health Minister has sanctioned. A drum- 
 head court martial might have made short work of 
 you. However, I acquit you ; clinging to the hope that 
 you meant the poison for Menchikoff and Nachimoff. 
 Even while I write this, another medical event 
 has occurred which is significant many ways. The 
 Times newspaper by a hint, has called forth a sub- 
 scription from the public of i610,000; a subscription 
 headed by Sir Robert Peel ; for the effectual succor 
 of the wounded : and the lagging Government has 
 followed in the wake of The Times. This shews the 
 vast tremble of the public heart, and what it could do 
 if only rightly directed. But it is going to bolster 
 up exactly the same system, which has been so inef- 
 ficacious before : for it begins from the parlor of the 
 journal in which Homoeopathy has been already 
 smothered. No arnica is to be forwarded to Sebas- 
 topol, or to Scutari, that I can hear of — no arnica^ 
 to assuage the dreadful thirst of the wounded : no 
 
114 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 calendula, to make the flesh grow in the gaping 
 places : no symj)hijtuni for the shattered bones ! No 
 homoeopathic medicine chests ! At the bottom of 
 this well-peaked, protrusive, cotton-made bosom of 
 the charity of The Times, there lurk horrid dry ribs 
 of cruelty, a very skeleton in the land. It does good 
 in the market-place, and murders Homoeopathy, the 
 only true servitor of the wounded, in the closet. I 
 have been also shocked to see a letter signed Robert 
 Grosvenor, who is president of a homoeopathic hos- 
 pital, and member for Middlesex, who knows what 
 arnica and Homoeopathy are in his own family, yet 
 has not a word to say in the leading journal of their 
 application to the British troops. Oh ! fie ! thou 
 leader of the people ! Why canst thou not lead them 
 to that good of which thou knowest ? Very likely 
 The Times would not have put his letter in if he had 
 breathed a word of arnica and Homoeopathy. But 
 what then ? it did no good when it was in : it had no 
 rememberable part, not even a mite of money : no- 
 thing but my Lord^s dumbness of the good he knew, 
 endorsed by his noble name. Had he made the right 
 efibrt, the military journals, whose especial business 
 medical justice to the Army perhaps is, would have 
 given him a sufficient hearing ; and then he would 
 not have had the sad reflexion of having put his 
 candle under a bushel at the time when the British 
 Empire craved his little light. 
 
 But let me do one pleasant justice: I would to 
 God I could do more : I rejoice to see chloroform 
 included in the list of ample supplies. That greatest 
 surgical discovery of the age, that prompt lethe, has 
 always been to my mind one of the greatest realiza- 
 
THE PHARISEE BUTTERS HIS VICTIM. 115 
 
 tions.of tlie benevolent ^^punctuality of Providence." 
 Of course its administration involves skill, and it may- 
 be a fair question whether a soldier faint from loss of 
 blood is a fit subject for the appliance of chloroform. 
 On the other hand, I do not admire a hypothesis 
 advanced by a surgeon in The Times j that the prods 
 of the agonies of operations are a good stimulus to 
 the half swooning wounded. There is a sharpness in 
 that practice that hurts humanity, unless the fact be 
 quite correct ; in which case of course it is humane. 
 But I protest against recording the small per myriad- 
 age of chloroform deaths as conclusive against the 
 use of anaesthetics. Dr. Simpson, my adversary in 
 all else, is my true man here. Let another table of 
 deaths, a heavier list I opine, be balanced against 
 this, — that, I mean, of those who die of the nervous 
 shock that the knife gives to flesh and blood and 
 bone. The one average should be fairly set against 
 the other ; the difference be taken ; the result be 
 stated to those whom it most concerns, the patients ; 
 and as the chances of casualty are confessedly very 
 small, the patients may have the choice of braving 
 the peril if they please. But it would be most in- 
 human not to allow them the immunity from pain 
 which they may crave in moments so terrible as 
 those of surgical interference. 
 
 And now. Sir Benjamin, apropos of chloroform, let 
 us take a peep into those low tents in the rear where 
 the good surgeons with shirt sleeves up are doing 
 their work. The air is hot and fleshy with the red 
 reek w hich is there, but the spirit of the day, par- 
 ticularly as you have lost no blood yourself, will sup- 
 port you from fainting. I want you to mark all the 
 
116 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 noble assiduity in that flickering candle-light; the 
 strong skill of the swimmers in that sea of horrors. 
 There is a precipitation, too, such as these sanguinary 
 instants demand ; yet I think it is somewhat charge- 
 able to you and the Board that the hurry is greater 
 than it need be. Nature in her direst emergencies, 
 always has more time to give away than fear and 
 want of knowledge deem. It is only Allopathy that 
 has no simples, and no waiting, that is to say, no 
 observation. If you had used your arnica. Sir 
 Benjamin, on the field, there need not have been 
 quite so much haste in the surgical tents : and fewer 
 men would have died in their litters as they were 
 being carried to the fleet. Every operation that can 
 be postponed from the battle-field to the hospital, 
 gives a better chance to the patients, and the arnica 
 which you and your Board would not give, w ould 
 have made you the time of that postponement. The 
 system of which you are the head sends the whole 
 profession of physic, and especially of surgery, into 
 an unseemly hurry for instant efiects, and to capital 
 operations. You have therefore now witnessed under 
 your own eye the extraction of balls which ought to 
 have been left in, and the amputation of limbs which 
 ought to have been left on ; and that has happened 
 because you and the Board have been obdurate 
 against the vulnerary remedies of the homoeopaths. 
 In consequence, many lives have been lost, many 
 surgical blunders committed, much has been done 
 ofi'hand which required great deliberation ; many 
 •wounded men just dead from loss of blood, have lost 
 more still by your operations, and have succumbed : 
 and in short, you have been the patron of the spirit 
 
THE MORE HASTE THE WORSE SPEED. 117* 
 
 of hurry, wliicli, though it be the animating breath 
 of old physic, has no part in Homoeopathy ; whose 
 leading motto here also is, tuto, cito, et jucunde. 
 
 I must also tell you that you have lost here a fine 
 occasion for enlisting on the side of the healing art 
 the surgeons themselves, who have hardly a scrap of 
 faith in old physic, but who will be brought round to 
 the new faith precisely by witnessing, as pupils of 
 the homoeopaths, and often of the homoeopathic laity, 
 the undoubted action of vulnerary remedies. The 
 late Mr. Liston once told me that " medicine was a 
 stupid art.^^ He and his brethren are so much ac- 
 customed to real effects with their catlines and bis- 
 toui'ies, that they lack all feeling of solid fact in the 
 no-results for cure of the allopathic medicines. But 
 arnica, rhus, calendula, and the other wound-herbs 
 do proffer such speaking effects of the power which 
 medicines exert in wounds, bruises and the like, that 
 if you had first done your duty unflinchingly over 
 the heads of the surgeons, they would in all proba- 
 bility have been converted to physic by the common 
 soldiers and the nurses. You lost a golden chance 
 there. 
 
 As allied to the subject of the drugging of armies, 
 let me commend Homoeopathy to the transport de- 
 partment, on account of the great portability of its 
 means. Two or three chests of drawers would have 
 sufficed to contain the homoeopathic medicines for 
 the grand army of Xerxes ; exclusively of course of 
 the arnica, rhus, calendula and Symphytum, for the 
 wounded. So great a saving of room, so great a 
 convenience of carriage, would have rejoiced the 
 spirit of the conqueror of Scinde, Sir Charles Xapier, 
 
118 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 who abhorred baggage for working troops. On the 
 ground of cxpensiveness, too, after the men have once 
 been provided with their private medicine chests. 
 Homoeopathy will have greatly the advantage, and 
 Mr. Headland informs me that even with the first 
 supply of chests, it will not be so expensive as the 
 present system. However, were it ten times as costly 
 as the allopathic medical stores, its financial benefits 
 would be preponderant to a degree almost beyond 
 calculation. Nothing so utterly wastes armies as 
 disease. The damages of 12,000 men dead, and 
 18,000 hors du combat under Allopathy ; and which 
 make reinforcements brought from 3,000 miles dis- 
 tance continually needful, can hardly be estimated. 
 In fact, it is these things that constitute the bulk and 
 burden of National Debts. And accordingly it is 
 easy to see, that the adoption of Homoeopathy by 
 the British Government will lighten the grievous 
 calls of the tax-gatherer, and make every house in 
 the kingdom richer.* It alone will help my Lord 
 
 * I extract from the Fourth Annual Report of the London Homoeo- 
 pathic Hospital the following as bearing on this subject : — 
 
 " The legislatures of two of the most important States of the Ame- 
 rican Union (Pennsylvania and Ohio) have granted Charters of 
 Incorporation to Homceopathic Universities ; the Chambers of the 
 Kingdom of Bavaria, of the Grand Duchy of Baden, and other German 
 States, have authorized Professorships of Homoeopathy in the public 
 Universities ; the Imperial Government of Austria has instituted a 
 Professorship of Homoeopathy, and sanctioned the estabhshment of 
 Homoeopathic Hospitals in different parts of its dominions ; in Berlin 
 and Moscow similar hospitals exist ; and one hundred beds in the 
 Hospital of St. Marguerite (a branch of the Hotel Dieu, in Paris) are 
 devoted to patients who are openly treated on the homoeopathic 
 system, by Dr. Tessier and his hospital assistants. 
 
 " When the Bavaiian Pai-Uament and the Hungarian Diet, in 1843, 
 
OLD PHYSIC SPENDS FOUR MILLION OF OURS. 119 
 
 Kaglan " to bring into the field every available sol- 
 dier/^ and enable him to dispense in great part with 
 the necessity of sending home continual calls for 
 reinforcements, each man of ivhom costs £\bO. 
 
 To know the length and breadth of financial and 
 other function which pertains to you. Sir Benjamin, 
 you have only to recall what a single medical dis- 
 covery, lemon-juice for scurvy, has done for the navies 
 of the world : and to multiply this by the other dis- 
 eases which Homoeopathy will enable you similarly 
 to extinguish. To refresh your memory, and help 
 your deductions, I will quote from Elliotson^s Practice 
 
 unanimously agreed to recommend the merits of Homoeopathy to the 
 favorahle consideration of their respective Governments, it was shewn, — 
 
 " 1st. That, in Germany, the mortahty in homoeopathic hospitals 
 was not quite 6 per cent., whereas in allopathic hospitals it amounted 
 to more than 12 per cent. 
 
 " 2nd. That in severe inflammation, the mortality in allopathic hos- 
 pitals was nearly 15 per cent., and in homoeopathic hospitals not quite 
 5 per cent. 
 
 " 3rd. That in cholera, the mortahty in allopathic hospitals was 56, 
 and in homoeopatliic hospitals under 33 per cent. 
 
 *' 4th. That the average number of days which the patients remained 
 in the hospital was twenty-eight to twenty-nine in allopatliic, and from 
 twenty to twenty-four days in homoeopathic hospitals ; and 
 
 " 5th. That in homoeopathic hospitals the charge for each patient is 
 nearly half the expenditure for each patient in allopathic estabUsh- 
 ments."* 
 
 * " We must, however, bear in mind that this saving in money is a double or 
 a threefold benefit, for by shortening the time of the confinement of a patient, 
 while it saves the contributors the expense of his maintenance, it likewise re- 
 stores him sooner to his family, who may be, and probably are, reduced to great 
 straits by his disability to earn their food, and it gives a vacancy in the esta- 
 blishment for the relief of some other patient, who would otherwise be excluded 
 from want of room. For the want of funds and the want of room, not the want of 
 patients, fix the limits to the relief of the sick poor in this country.'' — Appendix 
 to a Concise View of Homceopathy, pp. 222, 223. 
 
120 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 of Physic a short passage on this one memorable 
 achievement of public healing : — 
 
 " The great cause of this disease," says Dr. EUiotson, 
 '' appears to be the want of fresh animal and fresh vege- 
 table food. It is on this account that the disease was 
 formerly very common at sea ; for, at one period, sailors 
 were supplied with nothing but salt provisions. So badly 
 M-ere ships formerly provided for, and so faulty was the 
 general management, that in the year 1726, when Admiral 
 Hosier sailed to the West Indies with seven ships, he 
 buried his ship's company twice ; and then died himself of 
 a broken heart. Deaths to the amount of eight or ten 
 a-day took place, formerly, in a moderate ship's company. 
 The bodies, after being sewn up in hammocks, were 
 washed about the deck, for want of sufficient strength, on 
 the part of survivors, to throw them overboard. Lord 
 Anson, in the year 1741, lost one half of his crew, by 
 scurvy, in six months. Out of nine hundred and sixty- 
 one men who sailed with him, only three hundred and 
 thirty-five were alive at the end of the year ; and at the 
 end of the second year, only seventy- one were fit for the 
 least duty ; — not to say duty, but for the least duty. Sir 
 Gilbert Blaine says that the disease used to appear in 
 about six or seven weeks from the beginning of sea- 
 victualling." 
 
 " The effects of lemon-juice on the disease are speedy 
 and wonderful ; — so wonderful, that the compiler of ' Lord 
 Anson's Voyage,' after describing the disease, and the 
 horrors which took place from its ravages, says that the 
 cure of such a complaint seems impossible, by any remedy, 
 or any management, that can be employed. Scurvy was 
 formerly set down, without hesitation, as an incurable 
 disease; — not only as a disease incurable then, but as 
 
PRICELESS WORTH OF ONE SPECIFIC. 121 
 
 being so formidable in its nature, that it never would be 
 cured ; and yet, in almost every case, we can now cure it 
 with the utmost facility." 
 
 " So great is the effect of this remedy, that you will 
 find the following passage in Sir" W. Herschel's work, 
 published in Dr. Lardner's CyclopcBdia^ on the cultivation 
 of the physical sciences. 'At present, the scurvy is al- 
 most completely eradicated in the navy ; — partly, no 
 doubt, from an increased and increasing attention to ge- 
 neral cleanliness, comfort, and diet ; but mainly from the 
 constant use of a simple and palatable beverage, — the acid 
 of lemon, served out in daily rations. If the gratitude 
 of mankind be allowed on all hands to be the just meed 
 of the philosophic physician, to whose discernment in 
 seizing, and perseverance in forcing it on public notice, 
 we owe the great safeguard of infantile life ; it ought not 
 to be denied to those whose skill and discrimination have 
 thus strengthened the sinews of our most powerful arm, 
 and obliterated one of the darkest features, in one of the 
 most glorious of all professions.' " 
 
 Now ponder this well, Sir Benjamin, and let me 
 remind you that cuprum will do for cholera, arnica 
 for wounds, rhus for wettings, and rhus and bryonia 
 for fevers, that same saving which lemon-juice has 
 effected for scurvy : saving of life, saving of cash, 
 saving of the material power and glory of Great 
 Britain : saving also of Medical Humanity. 
 
 But, Sir, we have yet one more scene to visit 
 together, connected with all we have previously wit- 
 nessed : a home scene, Sir Benjamin ; and we must 
 now ascend a mountain of pity high enough to com- 
 mand the dewy extense of three kingdoms. From 
 thence we have to look down from every point of our 
 warm hearts with a sight as multifold as the cherubic 
 
 G 
 
122 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 eyes. We are to see with equal penetration through 
 the diverse thickness of castles_, mansions and cottages, 
 tlirough London and through hamlet, at young wives 
 and aged mothers, little children, brothers and sis- 
 ters, — all groups and ties that are ; and at affianced 
 maidens, ties that were to be. There are rents and 
 tears to-day in the general life : the bulletin of the 
 dead has come, and the groups of sorrow are consti- 
 tuted. Splendid Paris bends as a Niobe or as a 
 Rachel while the corse of her much enduring Hero 
 is borne to the marble Invalides ; other corses go 
 earthwards with a shorter procession, helped away 
 by the spades of ruder but more instant sculptors : 
 the rucked sod of the Alma is their urn and monu- 
 ment in one ; yet every warrior among them is also 
 buried to-day with swelling greatness of obsequies, 
 if we could see them, in the everlasting ruby vaults 
 of some human heart. You are touched. Sir Ben- 
 jamin, and are justly religious on this summit. Struck 
 down for a moment from worldliness, we both dis- 
 course without an after-thought on the immortal 
 state : we hope that the brave are already welcomed 
 in the land of peace : that the laurels they could not 
 stop to take, and the earned promotion they seem to 
 have missed, are clad upon them now by the God of 
 battles in front of the shining armies of the just. 
 We hope also that if their voices could now speak to 
 the mourners they have left, the oil of their sure 
 gladness would heal our faithless sorrow. It is a 
 true strain no doubt, and yet but of momentary 
 power. 
 
 Recovered a little from weakness and spirituality. 
 Sir Benjamin, you ask me what all this undoubted 
 
GRIEF HAS ITS TIDES. 123 
 
 matter has to do with our present relation ? I will 
 tell you^ — all those sorrowing hearts are your patients. 
 They may not have called you in, but you have called 
 yourself in as health minister to the British com- 
 munity ; and all general and calculable casualties in 
 the human frame, in their healing are your vocation. 
 You are Emperor of the Bills of ^Mortality ; every 
 week they issue from your palace. Each day is a 
 battle of the Alma; every common death leaves a 
 wounded family in your medical charge. This bul- 
 letin has done nothing but in the way of a little more 
 suddenness than usual : the shock has been speedier ; 
 hopes of friends have died in a moment instead of 
 expiring in months : the malady of cannon balls has 
 told quicker on the fallen and on the survivors than 
 other diseases. But it is only a difference of degree. 
 Similar patients, thousands weekly from London 
 alone, have been crying out to your Board of Health 
 since its first inaugm^ation. 
 
 Appeal to the doctors about you, unusually grave 
 to-day, by their human commiseration, to tell you 
 what to do for this piteous bleating flock of your 
 shorn countrymen. Remind them that grief strikes 
 and shatters the body, and that they have given you 
 to understand that the ailing body is their business. 
 Observe to them that if they cannot staunch the 
 rushing sorrow in the mind, which you do not ex- 
 pect from them, they may cancel its eating eftects 
 upon the physical organization. Recall to them that 
 you have read in old books, of philtres for love, and 
 medicines for sorrow, and beseech them if that tra- 
 dition be now overpast in the strides of science. 
 Pray them then for the better gift that has come 
 
 g2 
 
124 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 instead. Tell tliem that woe deranges hearts of flesh ; 
 that it sends dire dead apathy into the cordial nerves ; 
 that for long years after sueh sorrows, those who 
 have forgotten to mourn still feel cold lumps of ice 
 instead of the cheerful pieces of their breasts, and 
 walk with half alive frames and vitals, because the 
 blood springs have been frost nipt. Ask them whe- 
 ther this, and the beginning of this, be not as much 
 within their province, as hypertrophy with dilatation, 
 or disease of the semilunar valves. If they have 
 nothing to answer you. Sir Benjamin, and above all 
 if they smile and commence to leer, come out of the 
 midst of them, for they are doomed doctors. If you 
 stay where they are, you will catch flintiness out of 
 their ribs. 
 
 And yet I am too certain there is not a word in 
 'them, else they would have said it long ago. They 
 have fallen upon another direction : Augsea, not 
 Hygeia, is their chosen path. Let them be com- 
 mitted to the sewers for life, with The Times and Dr. 
 Fungus Kantanker of The Athen(Bum fording the inky 
 drains at their head, seated one behind the other 
 in paper caps on Mr. Chadwick^s pony. You and I 
 are now the clearer for Homoeopathy. Benign as 
 usual, apt as usual in resources, gathering up as 
 usual the cures and pearls of the whole medical past, 
 full of new observation and old witnesses of common 
 sense in man's wonderful body, the art which sprang 
 by providence from Hahnemann's front, comes armed 
 and equipaged to the door of the national sorrow. 
 The bodily grief shall be chastened ; it shall pass 
 away without scathing the vessel ; wailing shall have 
 its decent time, and then shall be exchanged for 
 
IGNATIA HEALS WOUNDS OF SORROW. 125 
 
 work : the tears shall flow fast, but shall not eat the 
 guarded cheeks : the man shall follow his brother to 
 the tomb, and then, unspoilt, shall proceed by the 
 spiritual tracks of industry here to follow him in the 
 spiritual life : God's armies on the material shore 
 shall keep tramp and pace with His parallel white- 
 sailed fleets on the eternal ocean. The doctrine of 
 the true medicine shall do for the body what the faith 
 and sight of the Christian effect for the soul. That 
 earthwardness of the frame which bending sorrow 
 makes, and which continues itself into disease, shall 
 be raised upright again ; just as the fruitless regrets 
 of the mind are redeemed into manliness and woman- 
 liness by the consolations of religion. The strict 
 bodily side of this, in its general aspects, is what the 
 Health Minister owes to the people : it is the sweet 
 accompaniment to your bitter Bills of Mortality; and 
 I will now tell you the beginning of how to manage it. 
 There is a plant. Sir Benjamin, which grows in the 
 far islands of the Eastern seas, and which, in the 
 Homoeopathic giving, is a most sovereign remedy 
 against the injuries of sorrow : that plant is termed 
 ignatia amara ; a plant bitter like sorrow itself, and 
 like good sorrow of infinite beneficence in its inten- 
 tions. If there had been a Board of Healing, that 
 Board, with the bulletin, would have recommended 
 to all whom it might concern to mix a dozen globules 
 of the sixth dilution of ignatia in a wineglass of 
 water, and to take a teaspoonful of the tasteless and 
 harmless mixture three or four times a day for two 
 or three weeks. That issue of directions would have 
 been the medical collect for the occasion. But few 
 of those heaviest struck would do it for themselves. 
 
126 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 because grief is absorbing, but the more erect mem- 
 bers of the afflicted families would press it upon the 
 attention of the rest, representing to them that all 
 duty required them to provide for their future pros- 
 pects of health ; especially since the loss of the 
 family's strong arm, in a father, or a husband or 
 l)rother slain, added to the call of strength which 
 would be made on the remainder. In this way, per- 
 haps by little and little, the use of this invaluable 
 drug would be propagated. The same would apply 
 to the deaths of each week; and to those which every 
 post may bring as the upshot of our future battles. 
 If you had known and done this part of your func- 
 tions, we should more seldom hear such histories as 
 this : "Mrs. So and So never held up her head again 
 after the intelligence of her son^s death : Miss Blank 
 died of a broken heart when her lover was killed : 
 the old mother of Lieut. P. never smiled more after 
 she heard the fatal news.^^ I might multiply these 
 cases to any extent ; they are a common bodily fruit 
 of the battle of life ; and the numbers crippled and 
 carried downwards, and slain outright in this way, is 
 a matter only to be known by those who have a large 
 acquaintance with the diseases of the people. Death 
 in this way engenders death among the proper living ; 
 the crops of wounded, bruised, and broken hearts 
 come as regularly in this mortal world as crops of 
 grass ; for all flesh is grass for the Old Mower. Pro- 
 vidence has sown broadcast general remedies for this 
 general disease ; simple and applicable to each day^s 
 processions of mourners. Of these remedies there are 
 many, but Ignatia is perhaps the first. I can tell 
 you from abundant practice that it is of a true effi- 
 
BOARD OF HEALTH SCOUTS IGNATIA. 127 
 
 cacy. Sometime ago, Sir Benjamin, I received by 
 post a most lugubrious looking letter : like the very 
 billet of an undertaker. I had lost a good relation 
 just before, and on breaking the large sable seal, lo ! 
 and behold ! a sympathetic house in Regent Street 
 had sent me a catalogue of all mourning. I could 
 have dived into black by that list down to very Cim- 
 meria, and come up deatVs own chimney sweep. It 
 struck me as a remarkable coincidence, that just on 
 that day that commercial house should divine my 
 loss, and proffer its answerable livery. I then recol- 
 lected that my relative's passage out of life had ap- 
 peared in that morning's Times, and I began to put 
 two pieces of an event together. On comparing notes 
 with others, I discerned at length that the proprietors 
 of that establishment consulted the newspapers every 
 day, and sent their mourning list to all the directions 
 in which deaths were chronicled. Very decent, spi- 
 rited, and tradesmanlike 1 The thought then oc- 
 curred to me, that that shop knew and did its busi- 
 ness a great deal better than the Board of Health, 
 which with an exhaustive knowledge of the families 
 in which current deaths have happened, never yet 
 sent a single recommendation to the people, availing 
 to obviate the general maladies that come of sorrow. 
 Perhaps you will tell me the doctors ought to manage 
 this : but why the doctors ? A general prescription 
 from your hand will apply to the afflicted at once. 
 There will undoubtedly be cases in which other sim- 
 ples will be needed; true medical cases: after so great 
 a number have been cleared away by your Board, a 
 very few skilful Homoeopaths will suffice for the re- 
 mainder. The registers of the several districts, who 
 
 .^ 
 
128 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 arc ill close relation with your Board, and who wait 
 upon every house in case of death, may form a ready 
 means of carrying out your humane intentions here ; 
 as they do already in the matter of vaccination. 
 There is nothing more impertinent in guarding the 
 public against the injurious consequences of grief, 
 than in ensui'ing them against those of smallpox.* 
 The one service is only a little higher than the other 
 in the offices of a progressive Ministry of Health. 
 
 I shall not apologize for being repetitious_, Sir 
 Benjamin, for iteration of plain facts unknown to 
 you is my business and my duty; and therefore I 
 again beg you to observe, that that Homoeopathy 
 despised and rejected of your Board and The Times, 
 is here again the only candidate for the medical ser- 
 vice of the State. The medicinal treatment of not one 
 single mental symptom, and of not one bodily affec- 
 tion springing from the influence, emotions, and con- 
 
 * The reader will do well to keep the instance of vaccination before 
 him, as offering perhaps the sohtary specimen in which old physic, 
 instructed here by milkmaids and the common people, has laid firm 
 hold of a Homoeopathic practice and law ; for of course vaccination 
 cures one disease by infecting the system with another similar disease. 
 What is the consequence of this certainty depending on a general prin- 
 ciple of cure ? Why, that this point of practice comes at once into 
 relation with the Government, being applicable, by the simplest means, 
 to the masses, and to nations. And mark this, wherever a specific is 
 found for maladies which are common, that specific must ultimately 
 come into legislation, and engender laws to ensure its being earned out. 
 This is the plain and pressing interest of every state upon earth ; as 
 attested in vaccination, which is the germ of state-medicine. Homoeo- 
 pathy has numberless such simple specifics, and it is easy to see that it 
 knocks at the door of Parliament in such a manner as must insure its 
 admission among our statutes, being welcomed there by the already 
 existing vaccination laws. Allopathy raises no such claim. 
 
OLD PHYSIC LEAVES THE MIND OUT. 129 
 
 ditions of the mind, has been attempted by old phy- 
 sic. If it had, the prescriptions, judging by all the 
 rest, would be so unmanageable, that you could never 
 commend them to suffering masses of your country- 
 men : each one would require the presence of a me- 
 dical man to obviate its own bad consequences, or at 
 any rate to see that it was not carried too far. Allo- 
 pathy does not even know that another drug, chamo- 
 millaj given in globules, will cure a large proportion 
 of the cross tempers of infants and little children, 
 and reduce fractious nurseries to order. It stifles 
 crying with opium. In short, it has neglected spe- 
 cifics altogether ; has made no studies of the effects 
 produced on the mind by drugs ; and is not aware 
 that those medicines that engender in healthy sub- 
 jects certain tempers, moods, and states, will extin- 
 guish, in Homoeopathic doses, those very tempers, 
 moods, and states in individuals morbidly suffering 
 from them. I therefore repeat that, as Health 
 Minister, Homoeopathy is your plan and your sys- 
 tem, your sole chance for healing manifestoes, and 
 that at this present, you have no other. 
 
 I dare say. Sir Benjamin, I shall be accused by 
 the doctors of materialism ; though indeed I am no 
 materialist, but believe in the distinction of man from 
 all matter, and of human life from all other life. Yet 
 it is a fact that drugs do affect the mind, and the 
 study of their effects thereon is most important for 
 the cure of mental and bodily diseases. I shall also 
 be told, in this proposed matter of chastening general 
 griefs, that sorrow is a sharp blessing which does the 
 soul good. But sorrow enough will be left for that 
 after you hav6 done your best. Moreover this is 
 
 g3 
 
130 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 parallel to the surgeon^s remark in TJie Times, that 
 the horrid smart of the knife is a proper stimulus to 
 the wounded man. I should have thought that the 
 'wound itself might have sufficed for the supply of 
 this quickener. But let me not waste my brief hour 
 with you in any more side remarks to the boers of 
 Fogydom. 
 
 Did it ever occur to you, Sir Benjamin, that the 
 principles of science have done great things for us in 
 this particular age ? That one chief difference be- 
 tween what we are, and what we were, as a material 
 estate, lies in the fact that certain principles have 
 been discovered, and applied ? It is true, we have 
 not got far towards the world^s core, but we have laid 
 hold of facts which themselves stand as principles to 
 many other facts; and thereby we have attained 
 a wide command of consequences. Railroads, tele- 
 graphs, steam ships, steam printing, and a hundred 
 other new things, each have their germ in a stroke 
 of genius at some more central power than had before 
 been handled, and which, once grasped, became, by 
 incessant experiment, our servant thenceforth for in- 
 numerable behests, — things which before we did not 
 venture to expect. Each of these things has come 
 into the service of the State, with a readiness exactly 
 in proportion to its importance. By this means the 
 machinery of power in the hands of this Government, 
 has become enormous : heat, electricity, mechanical 
 leverage, speed, power over winds and waves, are ex- 
 ercised in the Cyclopean underworld of the State, as 
 if it were a little viceroy of the energies of the earth. 
 And while individual force is at the highest, the sheer 
 force of the country overtops all private statures of 
 
OLD PHYSIC LEAVES THE WORLD OUT. 131 
 
 power. As a result, look at the transport of great 
 armies in mighty fleets ; at the steady landing of the 
 myriads ; at the novel strength of every man from the 
 knit strength of the whole ; and then acknowledge 
 that a few principal facts, laboriously worked out, 
 have altered the relation between our race and the 
 planet. Now where, Sir Benjamin, is the correspond- 
 ing fact in physic ? Medicine is to this Russian war 
 just where it was to the last great war : with the 
 single exception of disputed chloroform, there is no 
 general difference. It is not an inch nearer to the 
 Bureaus of Government : it has gained no principal 
 facts that it can impart to the state : it has no simpli- 
 fied modes of treatment communicable in a few words 
 from the heads of departments to their subordinates : 
 it saves no greater numbers than formerly from epi- 
 demic visitations ; it has achieved no rule of treatment 
 and no unity of opinion among its own professors : in 
 one word, it offers no mechanism of State Healing to 
 the commonwealth. What a disgraceful antithesis it is 
 to the progress of the world ! A profession which, from 
 lack of healing facts, is a rope of sand in this most 
 strong-linked age of time and empire of nature. You 
 may gather together two hundred and fifty doctors in 
 the Crimea, but with every good- will but one on their 
 brave part, they are two hundred and fifty little peb- 
 bles, which have no cohesion. For the proverb in- 
 creases in point — doctors differ. How is it possible such 
 a concourse of atoms can have any affinity with the 
 State? You might as well now expect a queen's mes- 
 sage to travel by the old coach down to Edinburgh. 
 They are all private incommunicating gentlemen to- 
 ,^_^ther, Sir Benjamin, and can have nothing to do 
 
132 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 with your INIinistry of Health. That wants new prin- 
 ciples, unity, cooperation, association ; such as landed 
 us in the Crimea, and such as, medically applied, 
 will put us on the shores of a desired and promised 
 land of healthful power. 
 
 Now Homoeopath}^ is exactly such a State Mecha- 
 nism as old physic is not. It is general and simple 
 to a Health Minister's hand. He, charged by his 
 faithful Homoeopathic Council, can prescribe in a few 
 words for whole classes of his subjects. It has one 
 principle on which all its professors are agreed, similia 
 similibus curantur, one fire puts out another's burn- 
 ing. By this it commands the field of pathology, and 
 makes ever new conquests; the irremediable disease 
 of to-day is curable to-morrow, because a drug pro- 
 ducing a like disease has just been found and proved. 
 It is especially applicable to epidemics, in which I 
 include for the nonce the casualties of battle, general 
 morbid states of the national mind, ordinary pesti- 
 lences, and the like : (looked at from your elevation 
 of statistics, it is hard to say what is not epidemic :) 
 and it is so applicable for a good reason, viz., that it 
 has a general principle of cui'e. It preserves, and not 
 even temporarily injures, during its administration, 
 the efficiency of its patients. It is rapid beyond all 
 former precedent in tackling acute diseases, and land- 
 ing them in speedy convalescence. It is beloved in 
 the nursery and the lying-in chamber, because it is 
 so gentle and so strong. It is dear to the soldier, for 
 it kneels down and serves him the moment he falls on 
 the field of battle. It touches mind equally with body, 
 and is able to give a nation that confidence of having 
 a real elixir in its wallet, that is itself a tower of 
 
HOMCEOPATHY SITS WITH THE AGE. 133 
 
 strength against disease. It dispenses light to the po- 
 pulationSj because it has liberal light in itself. It in- 
 spires its professors also with a faith and hope that 
 are the very pulses in the arm of skill : and with a 
 delight in healings that puts off the doctor's fatigue to 
 the late hours of his day. Sir Benjamin, it is just 
 the thing for you, and most willing to be yours for 
 the service of the British people. You will find that 
 it is " Hail fellow, well met " with steam and progress, 
 light and electricity, and with all the new loves and 
 charities of man, and all his strengths, all over the 
 world. 
 
 I have hitherto tried to give you a little opening of 
 the new duties which will amount to the constitution 
 of the Board of Healing, and which will be altogether 
 difierent from those of the present Board of Cleanli- 
 ness, which will be next to Godliness when it is asso- 
 ciated with your own distinctive or Homoeopathic 
 Ministry. At present however your Board of Cleanli- 
 ness is in a totally false position, co-operating with Al- 
 lopathy, which dirties as fast as you clean. You and it 
 are like a bad housemaid, which first scrubs and then 
 litters; then scrubs and litters again. Carry your 
 sewage pipes a little higher and finer ; insert one of 
 them by an hour-glass hole into the bottom of the 
 calomel bin, and carry another into the lowest level 
 of the castor oil tank ; and then you wiU drain an-ay 
 the sources of many a national and individual malady. 
 You will also then be at one with yourself, which is 
 the source and beginning of all action. When your 
 ministry is once well afoot, there is nothing to which 
 I can liken its functions, but to a certain tree pro- 
 tnjsf>.-l some day to be planted in a cleared and 
 
13i THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 renewed earth, and in a city which comes from above 
 downwards : a tree " which bears twelve manner of 
 fruits, and yields its fruit every month, and the 
 leaves of that tree are for the healing of the nations, ^^ 
 For every month you will put forth leaves of cure. 
 The heat of summer and the ice of winter, the malig- 
 nant east wind, the equinoctial perturbations, the 
 damps and fogs of all English seasons, are a set of 
 general causes with which you will do current battle : 
 and each as it comes will have your comment, and 
 the instructions of your ministry how to meet it. 
 The herbs are growing, Sir Benjamin, and gathered 
 too, which will clothe our human nakedness with 
 immunity as it passes through these destructions of 
 the year, and give it that which is truly human, 
 fixity of principles, and self-maintenance in the midst 
 of the fluxes of nature. You have only to take these 
 herbs out of the open hand of Homoeopathy ! Besides 
 these causes also, you will attend somewhat carefully 
 to the general seasons of man's life; for these too 
 are fully perturbed. From teething to toothlessness 
 there are many general maladies which you will treat 
 on your great scale. First comes the infant, mewling, 
 for which you will teach mothers to give homoeo- 
 pathic chamomilla, and pewking, for which they will 
 give similar ipecacuanha, in the nurses arms. Then 
 comes the cutting of teeth, for the pains of which 
 enlargement of powers, they will give again chamo- 
 milla, and in hot heads, belladonna ; saving convul- 
 sions oftentimes. Sir Benjamin, and piloting the 
 small skifi* through quiet tarns. Next the infantine 
 diseases; aconite and pidsatilla for simple measles; 
 nux vomica, ipecacuanha and drosera for whooping 
 
DECREES FOR THE HEALTH MINISTER. 135 
 
 cough ; and belladonna and mercurius for domestic 
 scarlet fever. You will sympathize especially with 
 growing pains; for you know how bad they are to 
 bear : it has cost your own bones a heavy ache to get 
 them out of the allopathic dwarfing : you know how 
 hard it has been for you to grow from the infinitesi- 
 mal good of the old school to the gross benefactions 
 of the new : you will therefore publish from your 
 high seat that the young who are expanding with pain 
 and weakness, shall have two globules of calcai^ea 30 
 twice a week ; and if in a month they groan still, a 
 globule of phosphoric acid 12 every morning. Next 
 you will have regiments of young damsels under your 
 eye at the age of sweet sixteen, and for these you will 
 order pulsatilla, and if the roses of their cheeks are 
 long in coming, occasional sulphur. At 21, wherever 
 love has not been happy, you will not forget ignatia. 
 Later on, at and about the ripe Indian summer of 
 woman^s 40, and a little after, your general recom- 
 mendation to that fine age in your subjects, will be 
 sulphur and lachesis. Recollect also that you bear 
 "twelve manner of fruits ^^ — most divers attentions to 
 the people. And in the course of your pilgrimage 
 among their ages, you will now meet with many 
 middle aged gentlemen, otherwise strong, who are in 
 a sad state of confusion, obstruction, and if I may so 
 speak, constipation. They are melancholy victims of 
 your former no-doings : specimens of what Allopathy 
 runs into when it tries to be generous, and to consti- 
 tute domestic medicine, for its tender mercies are 
 cruel : in short, slaves to the pill-box. Take all these 
 under your wing at once : tell them that tliis consti- 
 pation from which they are breathless with running, 
 
13G THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 is an allopathic bugaboo, a turnip with a red lamp in 
 it. They will do you credit. Tell them to burn 
 carefully all their pill-boxes, and to lend you their 
 health for three or four months : also tell them to 
 mix three globules of nux vomica 12 in a wineglass oi 
 water, and to take it night and morning for a fort- 
 night. If they are not cured, let them do the like 
 with sulphur 12 : and so on alternately for the three 
 or four months. At the end of that time, you will 
 have a very small percentage of them on the list; 
 and these will come under medical treatment. Now 
 why should you not put that much, for these people, 
 occasionally in the papers, advertising the benignity 
 of your office ? The Morrisons and Culverwells put 
 their pills there for gain; and why not you, your 
 healers, when you have nothing to get by it but the 
 health and blessings of your British flock. The 
 Ministry of Health might present it compliments in 
 that shape without any degradation to that general 
 mass of sufierers. You already approve of a greater 
 interference than this in what you call emergencies, 
 when you order "house to house visitation : ^^ all 
 general forms of sickness are an emergency to the 
 sufferers, and it is therefore both your right and your 
 duty to hunt them out and pursue them, till you 
 convert them into wholeness. 
 
 In the course of your practice. Sir Benjamin, for 
 you will have such a blessed practice as no physician 
 on earth has even desired, one manner of your fruits 
 will be especially administered for the eradication of 
 hereditary tendencies and diseases. With the most 
 delicate pipe- work of the science of your Board you 
 wiU proceed to drain those old swamps and miasms 
 
HEALTH MINISTER WINS HIS SPURS. 137 
 
 that undermine the populations of your country. 
 Rickets and scrofula will come under your decisive 
 engineering. What '^ the criminal classes" are to the 
 moral state, that these born infants of disease are to 
 the physical humanity; and you will be the Lord 
 Shaftesbury of a new realm of the children of pain. 
 The rags of their poor flesh and bones will be the 
 hospital card of their admission to your bounty ; and 
 before they are thought of by their future parents, 
 they will be precisely cared for in the foundations of 
 your paternal institution. Those great human mo- 
 rasses termed workhouses will begin to be won into 
 cultivation and sanitary propriety by your efforts 
 here. You will tell these people that the nature of 
 things is not all against them ; that there are true 
 substances on their side ; and you will order them for 
 their young rickets two globules of calcarea carbonica 
 30 in fourteen teaspoonfuls of water, a teaspoonful to 
 be given every morning. This they mil continue for 
 weeks, or months, according to benefit : and after- 
 wards they will do the same with sulphur 30 given in 
 the same way : returning upon the calcarea every 
 now and then for another month. You will also 
 order cod-liver oil in half-teaspoonftil to the infants, 
 once or tmce a day. You will make many bandy 
 legs straight, Sir Benjamin, many too large heads and 
 stomachs healthily compassable, by these incredibly 
 simple means : you will save many a crooked back : 
 and in after life many a case of consumption. Your 
 success here \vill greatly increase your practice, for 
 by very deeds you will have got into the hearts of the 
 nper. You will also have disembarrassed the doctors 
 (of a new set of domestic cases ; and given them time 
 
138 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 for their own real part : a vast advantage for medi- 
 cine proper, as I can tell you. 
 
 Nor will the world of your country^s industry be 
 omitted from the care of your humane Bishopric of 
 Bodies. You know that in the exercise of daily call- 
 ings various injuries are apt to occur, by fixed laws, 
 on account of a certain incompatibility existing in 
 nearly every mode of life with the natural require- 
 ments of health. One reason of this is, that the great 
 esprit de corps, the fire of industry and common- 
 wealth love, is not sufficiently white within us, to 
 spread over us the full shield of its own immortalities 
 and immunities; in consequence of which our cir- 
 cumstances attack and bite us more than they ought. 
 Large classes are too sedentary, and work their heads 
 more in proportion than their bodies; digestion, 
 which equilibrates the body with the head, suflPers 
 grievously therefor. Many also work in smoke and 
 dust of various kinds, and the organs of breath labor 
 and are in danger. Many too crowd their minds of 
 a day with the cares of fifty years ahead, spend and 
 invade their night's sleep, and become bent and aged 
 in their courage and their nerves. In shorty you 
 know well the story of the occupations of the people 
 as affecting the national health. Now for these gene- 
 ral causes you will hold medical councils, and as your 
 light comes, issue general prescriptions. Imagine the 
 happiness resulting from your triumphs here ! Your 
 ante- chamber, without a sycophant near it, receiving 
 occasional deputations of the trades which have made 
 Britain what she is : the ninefold Industries of this 
 great people, the Anglo-Saxon ISIuses, come up to 
 London to give a specimen of their strong quality of 
 
THE country's INDUSTRY THANKS HIM. 139 
 
 hearty thanks under the window of the Health Min- 
 ister. Sheffield and Manchester_, and the Coal Men 
 of the Tyne and Wear, and a hundred busy swarms 
 besides, each grateful for longer averages of life, and 
 harder powers of working ! I scarcely think that the 
 applause of the Houses of Parliament to a victorious 
 general can be comparable in its reception to the 
 flush of heart which will be yours, when you thus 
 receive from the vigorous Artisanship of the people, 
 the testimony of gratitude for that expanded health 
 which your adoption of the homoeopathic power and 
 light has enabled you to confer upon the industrial 
 populations of your country. 
 
 Doubtless, Sir Benjamin, you have noticed one 
 odd novelty in my address to you : the intermixture 
 of seemingly great things with seemingly small : 
 things that touch the heart and soul in the one 
 breath, and pilules and globules in the next. That 
 mixture is a doctor^ s life. He stands in the midst of 
 all pains and all apprehensions, and the agonies of 
 disease, and the solicitude of friends, cannot long 
 keep his unswerving eye from his little bottles. The 
 Prince of Healing, whose minister you are, hears the 
 blind man^s prayer : '^ Lord ! that I might receive 
 my sight :" He stoops down to the ground, and 
 makes clay of spittle, and " purges the visual ray.^' 
 We too must stoop down to that same ground, for it 
 is the great Pharmacopseia. This profession upon 
 which you are embarked, is the meeting place of the 
 health of the body and the soul, *^ ubi mystici agun- 
 tur conventus, et sacra junguntur fadera.^' And 
 stooping and rising, stooping and rising, are the 
 native undulations of the medical art. Therefore in 
 
1 iO THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 my singularities of style to you I have not been un- 
 true to man's hill and vale, to the sublimity and 
 lowliness of my subject. 
 
 I have indeed tried to batter down much, and if I 
 am not mistaken, I have made some of the main 
 square blocks in the old forts of Allopathy chatter 
 in their places, so that they will come down at leisure, 
 with I hope as few doctors injured by their fall as 
 possible. Yet my course is by no means destructive, 
 for I have not only proposed something better and 
 happier for physic itself than the old walled towns by 
 which it now menaces Societv, but I have also shewn 
 you in solid vision models of a new ministerial palace 
 for you and a true Board of Health, brighter and 
 ampler, more useful and more commanding, than 
 was ever yet inhabited by a British minister. If you 
 would only take possession, amid the acclamations of 
 the nation, the trumpet-applause of both services, 
 and the far-heard hymning of our patron, St. George, 
 and the sanitary angels ! You will also perceive that 
 I am not cap in hand in your antechamber, and want 
 no place in your counsels. I prefer my freedom of 
 voice, as useful to me beyond even the livery of Her 
 Most Gracious Majesty; and I reserve it untram- 
 melled for the next, and if need be, for many future 
 occasions. For though I abhor scribbling, and sor- 
 row for having done so much of it, yet this crisis is a 
 different matter; and because the Mural Crown is the 
 badge of my race, and healing is my business, I will 
 never be silent when I see the great interests of the 
 country trampled under foot by the hard neglect of 
 those who should know better. Sir Benjamin, I 
 pledge myself not to rest until the snowy standard of 
 
HE SUMMONS THE BAND OF HEALTH. 141 
 
 Homoeopatliy waves over the Ministry of Health, over 
 the Army and Navy, over Printing House Square, 
 and until its telegraphic signals from the head quar- 
 ters of your New Palace pass far and wide, with heal- 
 ing on their wings, to every the remotest corner of 
 my beloved country. 
 
 Having said thus much. Sir Benjamin, and I have 
 a right to say it, for you are my member, as well as 
 health minister, I will now proceed to the constitu- 
 tion of the Board of Health, which is the first matter 
 for you now to think of. We have already settled by 
 facts beyond cavil, that your adoption of Homoeopa- 
 thy is your only chance of having an active system of 
 State Medicine, and therefore of course you do adopt 
 it. The next point is, how to administer it; and 
 plainly this can only be done by a council of Homceo- 
 paths. Old physic will clearly decline all appoint- 
 ments made in this sense, and decline them ungrudg^ 
 ingly ; because you are not interfering with anything 
 it ever intended to do, or dreamt of as possible, but 
 about to perform functions quite new and to it most 
 foreign. It will then jog on its own way. Let the 
 appointments therefore be made, and seat around the 
 green baize table such of the chiefs of the homoeopa- 
 thic power in London as will heartily co-operate with 
 your intentions. I should like to see Dr. Laurie 
 there, because he has done more than any one else 
 perhaps in the world to carry Homoeopathy to mothers 
 and into private families, and to build up the domes- 
 tic part of it. For the rest, there are many men of 
 great ability who will be able to serve you. I confess 
 it would also please me to have Mr. Brady on the 
 board, because I yet hope that he will be the Luther 
 
112 THE iMINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 of Homoeopathy in the House of Commons. Allo- 
 paths arc, of course, inadmissible, just as single Ho- 
 moeopaths would be in a false position in the present 
 Board of Cleanliness. You must make a clean sweep, 
 and not try the dangerous experiment of putting our 
 new wine of life into the old chemists' bottles. If I 
 might make another suggestion, I would advise you, 
 even on the Medical Board, to have at least three in- 
 telligent homoeopathic laymen. Because as you are 
 going to write directions and prescriptions for the 
 whole laity of the kingdom, these gentlemen will be 
 able to tell you at once whether your instructions are 
 clear and intelligible to them, and presumably there- 
 fore to the rest. And as they will be family men, 
 they will represent in that important council the do- 
 mestic medical wants of the people.* 
 
 I have called you Emperor of the Bills of JMortality, 
 but in your new robes of healing you will soon cease 
 to deserve that title. In the course of a few years 
 the rates of death weekly will be so sensibly dimin- 
 ished, partly from the active power of your means of 
 cure, and partly that drugging, bleeding, blistering, 
 and calomelizing will have passed away for ever, that 
 old age will come to be connected with death once 
 m.ore, the doctors will escape finally from Moliere 
 and the comedians, and the decease of mankind will 
 
 * One obvious part of medical reform embraces the reconstruction of 
 the oflSce of Coroner, which can only be filled properly by a Ho- 
 moeopath, either lay or medical. For it is clear that Old Physic is so 
 bad a judge of what is Violent Death, that it is incapacitated for an 
 office in which that is the main question. For the same reason, no in- 
 quest ought to be considered as vaUd or transacted without having had 
 the benefit of the testimony of one or more homoeopathic physicians or 
 surgeons. 
 
NATURAL DEATH REAPPEARS. 143 
 
 be due to Nature and to Providence, whose benignity- 
 alone can sustain the credit of it. In the meantime, 
 as life will be longer the state will be stronger, and 
 new colonies to lisp your name and imitate your in- 
 stitutions will proceed out of the loins of your Hygeia 
 of Westminster. Sir Benjamin HalFs saveall— Ho- 
 moeopathy, will make a present to the British Empire 
 of the population of a large capital city every year. 
 Your functions will thus come to be associated ex- 
 clusively in men's minds with the constant topping of 
 births over deaths, in short with life and the living ; 
 and your Bills shall then change their name, and 
 shall be called the Bills of Nativity. 
 
 Besides all my other reasons, Sir Benjamin, I see 
 ground for knowing that these great changes are 
 imminent, not only in the present crisis of war and 
 cholera (which indeed proclaim a summa dies et ine- 
 luctabile tempus for old physic), but also in what I 
 would term a chronic crisis which has been gra- 
 dually revealing itself to all thinking mortals. So 
 much is expected from every man now, so much work, 
 and so much facing of his subject, so much turning 
 over of the golden minutes, that he has not time for 
 the indulgences and the neglects of former days. We 
 cannot afford to sit at our dinner tables tippling port 
 wine by the hour together, when we have headwork 
 to do this evening, and busy to-morrow in prospect. 
 Neither have we leisure for the calomel, salts and 
 senna of our ancestors. Function is altogether too 
 rapid for such rust as this to come into it. None but 
 gentlemen of fortune and consummate indolence 
 have a right to these fads. There is an anecdote 
 which I have always found very prophetic on this 
 
144 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 score ; of Earl Howe, I think ; who feeling himself 
 one clay indisposed in his cabin, and living before the 
 days of Hahnemann, incontinently took a black 
 draught. He gave himself up to be useless for the 
 next three days. Suddenly a strange sail, perhaps 
 many strange sails, hove in sight, and rapidly came 
 nearer. He was summoned on deck, saw likelihood 
 of work, ran straight to the side of the ship, ex- 
 claimed, " By God, this '11 never do," put his finger 
 down his throat, and shot the black draught into the 
 sea. This admiral is here a mythos of Britain and 
 Allopathy. And looking from the hint of him, I 
 have known that as the country gets busier and 
 busier, it will spew that whole system out of its 
 mouth.* That time has come ; the industrial iron is 
 hot ; our duties increase with every morning that we 
 rise from our beds ; the enemy of inaction is in 
 sight ; and Neptune is waiting over The Britannia's 
 bulwarks for Old Physic. 
 
 Your statistical tables of mortality under the new 
 Board, instead of being dry diagrams upon which 
 the barrenness of medical art is exhibited every week, 
 will come to throb with scientific and humanitary 
 interest ; and year after year the comparison between 
 
 * This morning I had a confirmation of the truth of this as appU- 
 cahle especially to the industrious artisan. A good woman consulted 
 me for her husband, who has a bad cough. Two days ago he went to 
 *' the club doctor," who prescribed him an ounce of salts. " This '11 
 never do," was his wife's thought, so she came to me, told her story, 
 and wound it up by saying (the itahcs are her own), " The idea of 
 giAing a working man an ounce of salts." This matter of Allopathy, 
 by the bye, is a vital thing as connected \\-ith finance for Benefit Clubs : 
 they will improve their incomes, and increase theu' stabiUty, vastly, by 
 calling in the homoeopaths. 
 
THE EARTH CHIMES IN. 145 
 
 them will be most precisely instructive. You will 
 find some large items of death almost struck out of 
 your list by Homoeopathy ; pneumonia and fever, 
 whooping cough, measles and scarlatina, will cease 
 to occupy their present gross places, and your rela- 
 tions of numbers will be altogether changed. You 
 will know the tools that have worked this clearance, 
 and will then proceed by all public invitation and 
 encouragement, to seek for specifics for the more in- 
 tractable parts of your statistics ; to dig out the old 
 malignant stumps of disease. Homoeopathy will 
 date much of its own progress from your exact re- 
 gistrations and crying requirements. It is true no 
 government can create a Hahnemann, no premium 
 evoke or encourage him, and no applause from senates 
 or sovereigns make him work one jot harder than he 
 does for the good of his kind. But then, though 
 seeds and geniuses come from God, cultivation, which 
 also comes from Him, makes their generations pro- 
 ceed, and their works universal. And your Ministry 
 of Health will have vast opportunities of expanding 
 and enlarging the Homoeopathic Powers. On ques- 
 tions of medicines you will avoid one fault which, 
 like the wolves of hunger and poverty, has ruthlessly 
 pursued old physic : you will listen to the voice of 
 simple populations of remote places and rural dis- 
 tricts, when they tell you of their herbs and their 
 simples, and of the cures which their "irregular^' 
 good old women and good old men have performed 
 in their houses. By this means, like giant Antaeus, 
 you will get a shoot out of nature's veins of strength, 
 by touching the medical earth again : Hygeia will 
 bloom in cheek and fire in eye by sometimes breath- 
 
 H 
 
116 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 ing licr native country air among the rustics and 
 village maidens ; for you will then find out that me- 
 dicine has her birthplace in these unsophisticated 
 abodes ; and that the best things in the proud Phar- 
 macopoeia are nothing but the tangled and matted 
 tops of which herbs and simples are the root. Think 
 what a dominion of enquiry is here, for a Health 
 Ministry and a British Government, which has lands 
 and gardens and ancient populations under its sway 
 in every cHmate of the globe. I have often heard it 
 regretted by intelligent officers in our Indian army, 
 that the medical corps in Hindostan will obstinately 
 know nothing of the plants and simples made use of 
 by the native doctors and simplers, for no one who 
 is not M.D., or M.R.C.S.E., has a medical existence 
 in their eyes. But following Bacon you will take 
 stock of all this unlearned knowledge, which ever has 
 been the valuable raw material out of which science 
 and cures are made. You need only set this on foot. 
 Sir Benjamin, by a hint to the lay members of the 
 British army, and an invitation to British subjects in 
 all parts of the world ; and within a year or two you 
 shall enter a new world of medicinal substances, 
 shall extend the laboratory of every vegetable chemist 
 at home, and shall lay a basis for new physic which 
 both in solidity and amplitude will far surpass that of 
 Dioscorides. You will then be on a level with the age 
 on other great branches recently constituted, and the 
 beautiful lineaments and landscapes of physical geo- 
 graphy will have their humane double in that which 
 especially pertains in a medical sense to this swelling 
 Anglo Saxon life. Oceanic* or Geographical Physic. 
 
 * I borrow this word " oceanic" as a formula from one of the most 
 
STATE MEDICINE IS BORN. 147 
 
 You will also see now, Sir Benjamin, that there is 
 such a thing as State Medicine, and that it is a most 
 active industrial summit of the healing art, which re- 
 ceives from the art and science of Homoeopathy its 
 specific powers, and gives them, according to the im- 
 portance of the case to the nation, either the strin- 
 gency of legislative acts, or else the high patronage and 
 recommendations of the Health Ministry. Vaccina- 
 tion for small-pox, and lemon-juice for scurvy, are the 
 types of its twin departments. You can hardly fail 
 to have put together in your mind some of the tim- 
 bers and rafters of this great institution. State Me- 
 dicine hitherto has been confounded with Police Me- 
 dicine, or Medical Jurisprudence ; but that is another 
 as big mistake as confusing the Board of Health with 
 the Board of Cleanliness. State Medicine heals the 
 masses, as such : it can have no other meaning. It 
 helps virtue, skill, industry, economy, strength. 
 Police Medicine hounds murderers and ferrets poi- 
 soners, where ordinary evidence fails to net or to track 
 them. It assists the lawyers and Jack Ketch. There 
 is as great a difference between the two, as between 
 the Old Bailey and a royal palace ; or as between 
 old physic and Homoeopathy. 
 
 There is an ancient story. Sir Benjamin, which I 
 never think of without Homoeopathy rushing into my 
 head at the same time. It is from the Scandinavian 
 
 remarkable books of our time, Smith's Divine Drama of History and 
 Civilization. To Britain, according to this book, belongs the inaugura- 
 tion of a new providential epoch, which is no longer Judaean, Greek, 
 Roman, or French — no longer national and mediterranean, but plane- 
 tary, universal, or, as he beautifully calls it, oceanic. If this mission 
 be ours in other things, is it not also our part to constitute the begin- 
 ning of integral or oceanic physic ? 
 
148 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 mythology, and tells us of the build and convenience, 
 and of the qualities, of the ship of the gods. That 
 ship is called Skidbladnir, Sky -leaf or blade, or per- 
 haps Sheath-leaf; it was made by certain dwarfs, 
 and was by them given to the god Frey, the god of 
 seed and abundance. It was made of so many pieces, 
 and with so much art, that when it was not wanted 
 for sailing, it would fold up together like a kerchief, 
 and Frey could put it in his pocket. When it was 
 wanted by the gods, he took it out of his pocket, and 
 carefully unfolded it, putting first one foot into it; 
 pliant then, he could put his second foot in ; and 
 when his feet were in, he could get into it himself. 
 No sooner was one man in it, than two could get in ; 
 and when two were in, three and four ; and so on 
 more and more, until the entire array of Valhalla, 
 god and heroes, could swarm over and into its space- 
 respiring sides. When the full-armed host was on 
 board, as soon as the sails were hoisted, the ship had 
 fair wind, and went whithersoever it was steered. 
 When done with for that time, it went in by like 
 stages exactly as its crew of gods left it ; and by the 
 time they were all on shore again, Frey had it be- 
 tween thumb and finger, retired into a mere purse of a 
 ship, and replaced it quietly in his pocket. That ship 
 is the first way of telling us of Homoeopathy, and you 
 are to be the god Frey, the happy possessor of it. 
 The freightage which it carries is the basis of the 
 godlike in man, the health of the human family. 
 It is made by the dwarfs, for these are the secret 
 principles of science, working away in the smithies 
 of the underworld, but privileged at length to pre- 
 sent their completed industry to the fruitful daylight 
 
ANCIENT WISDOM SPEAKS. 119 
 
 powers. It lies at first like a pinch between the ap- 
 prehensive fingers, for it has a principle, similia 
 similibus curaiitur, so curt as to occupy but a single 
 cell in our intelligence ; but the principle is a prac- 
 tice also, and no sooner is it wanted, than it opens 
 like a huge airy fanship, and most unlike the crarnp- 
 ribbed allopathic luggers, and embraces all needs and 
 departments of healing. Sick armies and navies 
 one after another lie snugly bedded in crews, regi- 
 ments and legions, in its comprehensive berths. The 
 wind of success which lives within its sails, is no 
 other than the harmony of nature and truth, which 
 lends itself to immediate occasions. But when its 
 hospital wards are empty, it again shuts up, and is 
 nothing to the public eye. 1 think you will acknow- 
 ledge. Sir Benjamin, that the old Rune Men saw 
 Homoeopathy, together with many other true prin- 
 ciples and practices, from a kind of mythical Pisgah, 
 when they launched that simple infinitesimal ship, 
 and undeterred by its first size, put Valhalla within 
 its hospitable ribs. They meant for you there a prac- 
 tical lesson, in the convenient minuteness of prin- 
 ciples, in the elasticity of art, in the success of true 
 nature, in the little cost of real skill ; in the humble 
 unobtrusiveness of the best means after their work is 
 done. The homoeopathic medicine chest of the new 
 Ministry of Health is undoubtedly that ship sailing 
 now into the port of London, and its instructions to 
 ailing populations are the voyages which your gods 
 and heroes are to make through this ocean of time. 
 
 Speaking of Skidbladnir, " the best of ships," re- 
 minds me also of the wolf Fenrir, who was the 
 worst of wolves. Of him it is also written in northern 
 
 H 2 
 
150 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 Rimes, and as Homoeopathy is prefigm'cd in wliat 
 happened to him, I will also tell you a little about 
 him. He came by a monstrous kind of birth from 
 Loki, the god of mischief; he was very small at first 
 when he was brought out of the chaos of giants to 
 Valhalla, where he was fed by the unwitting gods ; 
 but he grew so much every day, and the seers fore- 
 told such ruin from him, that the gods got a strong 
 chain made with which to bind him. The wolf saw 
 that he was more than a match for it, allowed it to 
 be put on, and with one struggle and spurn burst it 
 in pieces. The gods prepared now a second fetter 
 half stronger than the first ; but out of this also 
 Fenrir shook himself in no time. The first chain 
 was the band of fraud, the second was the band of 
 material force; but neither of these bit him. The 
 gods were now alarmed at his prowess, and they sent 
 down Frey's messenger to the country of the dark 
 elves, again to certain dwarfs, and had a chain made 
 termed Gleipnir, or Gulper. It was smithied of six 
 things, — of the footfalls of cats, and of the beards of 
 women, and of the roots of stones, and of the sinews 
 of bears, and of the breath of fish, and of the spittle 
 of birds. This Gleipnir was fine and limber as a 
 silken thread. The wolf, with great reluctance, and 
 exacting a heavy pledge, allowed it to be put upon 
 him ; it mastered and gulped him in the wrestle, and 
 held him in its elastic belly for a thousand years. 
 Fenrir, you perceive, the wolf which we all have to 
 keep from the door, is disease. The first treatment 
 of the monster, who grows up among and at the 
 expense of our godlike powers, is naturally by fraud ; 
 we try to cheat disease and death with all strong 
 
THE WOLF TS BOUND. 151 
 
 diversions ; but they grow in spite of these, and even 
 acquire head and power in overcoming the false chain 
 LcRding or stealth. The body and substance of our 
 enemy being recognized, the second chain with which 
 we would cabin him, is violence, his quality; and 
 from this false force also he dashes with ease, feeding 
 on our rashness as his own hay. For he is said to 
 dash out of the fetter Dromij which means our tight 
 squeezing ; whereby we force disease into new con- 
 quests, and as the people say, drive it in. The 
 fetter effectual, Gleipnir, the gulper of disease, comes 
 out of dwarf-land, the underworld of the sciences, 
 in fact, Germany, and it is made of impalpables, 
 magnetisms and decillionths, and called Homoeo- 
 pathy : a dynamical scientific power. The rune book 
 says : " Thou mayest have seen that women have no 
 beards, and .that no pat falls from the tread of cats, 
 and that there are no roots under stones ; but then, 
 on the other hand, by my troth I know that all I 
 have said is equally true (with thy no sight) y though 
 there may be some things that thou art not of might 
 to experienced^ This signifies the impossibility and 
 improbability of Homoeopathy, the nothingness of 
 it ; and at the same time its power and its fact. I 
 don^t know that it would be possible to put its case 
 into a clearer relation to itself and its predecessors, 
 valetudinarian fraud, and allopathic force, than in 
 this old myth ; which stands written for your instruc- 
 tion in one of the earliest records of the Gothic race. 
 And now, quitting stories. Sir Benjamin, I hope 
 that in your old age (which may God and Homoeopa- 
 thy long put ofi" and protract), when this Marylebone 
 has been resigned, and your palace of health is occu- 
 
152 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 pied by your successor, you will write a final Bridye- 
 water Treatise^ as the legacy of your faithful life and 
 the record of your providential experiences, for the 
 home archives of the British people. The wisdom, 
 power, and goodness of God displayed in the crea- 
 tion ! No longer the anatomical muscles and tendons 
 of the human hand, but the liviug Divine Palmistry 
 itself is your theme. The revelation of God to man, 
 in the great healing power as it wells from God. You 
 wdll show that the smallest drops of the life of nature, 
 juices beyond all eyes to see, have each their pre- 
 destined and most manifold play of charities for the 
 human constitution. That man is put down upon a 
 planet made by an Everlasting Physician, — a globe 
 whose flints, chalks, and sulphurs are to repair the 
 old depth of his diseases, and whose plants grow for 
 our casualties, and to palliate the trembles and pains 
 that seasonably arise out of the stem of our weakness. 
 You will shew that poisons are run through with 
 goodness, and that serpents are emblems and pro- 
 cesses of eternity in this also, that life for the ailing 
 mainsprings of life lies under their well-appointed 
 fangs. ^ You will shew that water and air are great 
 pharmacopoeias, as holding the world of medicaments 
 in solution : the air columns of each parish for itself, 
 and the boundless envelope for us all. You will stand 
 in wonder among the peaks and spits of the electric 
 laws, and will surmise that they also are medically 
 precise; that they pierce the flashing heavens that 
 
 * Let me give my mead of praise to Dr. Rutherford Russell, for in- 
 troducing Cobra poison as a homoeopathic remedy in diseases of the 
 valves of the heart. It is a manel which will yet tell upon the statis- 
 tical tables of the Ministry of Health. 
 
THE HEALTH MINISTER ON PISGAH. 153 
 
 health may come down. In e\dclence of all this yon will 
 look with humble satisfaction at the long unrolling of 
 your statistics. Like a river getting purer and purer, 
 they run from the muddy beginnings of pestilence 
 and disease, by their own virtue dissolve their griev- 
 ous freight, and tend us into the desired haven and 
 sea of a clear and common old age. The human 
 hand of Providence, Sir Benjamin, the vein-work and 
 sinew-work of God^s mercies, is seen, and will be 
 more and more seen, in this grand correspondence of 
 nature with our wants, and your wants; in this 
 medical sufficiency of the universe to the primal crea- 
 ture. If you please it shall be the last theme that 
 the first Health ^linister of this kingdom, as he 
 stands on the great brink, shall rehearse for our 
 children's children. 
 
 Yet long before this day comes, you will have the 
 clergy of these realms on the side of Homoeopathy, 
 which has opened to you and the nation all this intel- 
 ligence, and all these substantial blessings. Already 
 in great part they have comprehended the large 
 divinity of their mission ; and many a parish has its 
 priest, and many a dissenting flock its minister, who 
 like our Master, dispenses healing to both the body 
 and the soul. Allopathy laughs at this, as it would 
 at " the clay made with spittle.^' But the ministers 
 of religion know their work, and do not take counsel 
 of man; and I leave the cause in their hands and 
 God's, with entire confidence in the result. 
 
 Minister of Health, and my dear Countrymen, and 
 Countrywomen, I am done. I have written to you in 
 haste, as it were between bedside and bedside, in the 
 intervals of ui'gent duties. Imperious haste! For Old 
 
15i THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 
 
 Physic is felled to the ground by the double-headed 
 hammer of war and pestilence. There it lies, blessed 
 be God ! "Violence/' saith the Psalmist/' is hunted 
 to overthrow, and destructions come to a perpetual 
 end.'' But then there also lie wounded and cholera- 
 smitten legions, biting the dust, and no one nigh to 
 help them. I tried to do my part by a voice for Ho- 
 moeopathy in the Leading Journal. It choked my voice. 
 Nothing was left me but to quit my loved privacy, 
 and appeal in my own smallness to you and yours. 
 With no spite to any man, but with indignation 
 against a vile system, and grief for its victims, I cry 
 aloud to you. Will you then listen to facts for your- 
 selves, and force the tardy Government and the 
 Ministry of Health to send out efficient succor to 
 bleeding and dying brothers who bleed and die for 
 you ? Will you insist upon a great and immediate 
 approval and appointment of Homoeopathy ? I ask 
 not for its trial, but for its adoption ; for it has been 
 tried, and it has succeeded, through half a century. 
 Recollect, you cannot shift the responsibility now to 
 the shoulders of Old Physic : incapable of all action, 
 it cannot carry for you a straw of the burden that 
 leadens your conscience. It can no more help you to 
 an opinion on this matter, than it can open the 
 graves of your kinsmen whom it lets die by sea and 
 land, and bid them live again. You must act for 
 yourselves, asking no question of Medical Boards, 
 whose sentiments as well as practices you know too 
 well already. Above all, you must not diplomatize 
 with Old Physic, which is the quick Ally of Death 
 and Brother of Pestilence. Time presses. Cholera 
 and wounds have no medical treatment. We are on 
 
ONLY LET US DO OUR DUTY. 155 
 
 the eve of great battles^ and each of them is fought 
 under the horrors of unrelenting diseases. You have 
 opportunity still to save thousands of lives, and to 
 prevent miseries incalculable. Contribute open- 
 mindedness_, courage, and human love, as well as 
 money, to the Patriotic Fund. Answer your Queen 
 by giving tivo mites ; one, all your soul, the other, 
 all your substance. Now is your accepted time, now 
 is your day of salvation. 
 
 THE END. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 I AM pleased to add the name of the distinguished Dr. 
 Charge, of Marseilles, to those who make it their business 
 to instruct the laity in medical practice. In the Preface 
 in the Ninth Edition of his Traitement Homoeopathique 
 Preservatif et curatif du Cholera Epidemique. Instruction 
 popidaire, pouvant servir de Guide en V absence du Medecin. 
 Marseille, 1854 ; he says, " J'ecris, cette fois, pour les 
 malades et afin de leur ^tre vraiment utile, je dirai ce qu'il 
 est essentiel de connaitre." At p. 6, ^^ Tout le monde, 
 sans etre medecin, peut et doit guerir le cholera, graces a 
 V Homoeopathie. . . . Des 1849 j'esperai le plus grand bien 
 de cette Instruction Populaire ; aujourd'hui fort de temoig- 
 nages nombreux, j'affirme que, par le secours seul de ce 
 travail, les gens du monde ont gueri un tres-grand nombre 
 de choleriques. . . . Cette affirmation n'est autre chose que 
 I'expression affaiblie de la plus stricte verite, et pourtant 
 c^est elle qui a revolte le plus les medecins de Vancienne 
 ecoleJ^ This pamphlet shews that Homoeopathy has been 
 applied with great success by Dr. Cabrol (physician to the 
 late Marshal St. Arnaud) to the cholera which raged among 
 the French troops at Varna. 
 
 Walton and Mitchell, Printers, 24, Wardour Street, London. 
 
 i 8 6J51 
 
JUN 1 7 1998 • J ) y--\,^^ \U^ 
 
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