WC262 W686w 1855 MffiOPATHY. t Presented in honor of Solon Ri chard Boynton , Sr . , M . D . COLLEGE OF OSTEOPATHIC PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. AN APPEAL TO SIR BENJAMIN HALL AND THE .BRITISH PEOPLE. BY JAMES JOHN GARTH WILKINSON, M. D., AUTHOR OF "THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS CONNECTION WITH MAN.' PRO CIVIBUS SERVANDIS. FROM THE LONDON EDITION, PUBLISHED BY OTIS CLAPP, AND CROSBY, NICHOLS, & CO., BOSTON. WILLIAM RADDE, AND FOWLERS & WELLS, NEW YORK. RADEMACHER & SHEER, AND BOERICKE & TAFEL, PHILADELPHIA. TRUMAN & SPOFFORD, AND E. MENDENHALL, CINCINNATI. MORTON & GRISVVOLD, LOUISVILLE. Also, by Booksellers and Periodical Dealers generally, throughout the TJ. States. 1855. CONTENTS o* J. J. G. WILKINSON'S WORK WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. Old Physic has the Cholera, 4 The Doctors directing Physic, 9 Homoeopathy succeeds admirably, 12, 13 The old Bogs of Allopathy, 14 Fatal Decrees of Allopathy, 15 Moral Fragrance of the Times, 16 Most crumpled up, 18 Great Acquaintances, 19 The expectant School expecting, 21 Allopathy's Comnlaints, 22 The Horrors of Decillionths, 24 Allopathy envies Fancy, 26, 27 Allopathy troubles Consciences, 29 Homoeopathy tackles acute Diseases, 31 Only one Way of trying Homoeopathy, 33 Hahnemann creates Materia Medica, 35 What Hahnemann has done, 37, 38, 39 Old Physic pesters Parliament, 41 My Medical Bill, 43 Medical Toleration, 415 Medical Free Trade, 47, 48 Medicine uncramped, 49, 50 The Lawyers find out Old Physic, 51 Homoeopathy lays Hands on Surgery, 52 Burgeon Herbs unknown to Surgeons, 53 The Poor freed from Hobson's Choice, 55, 56 Old Physic and the Laughter Cure, 57 Homoeopathy calls Witnesses, 58, 59, 60 Agitation not good for Conservatism, 61, 62 Mothers' Prospects look up, 63 Nurses in the Witness Box, 64 A Lady's Contumacy, 65 Master dismisses Old Physic, 66, 67 What a Board of Healing is and does, 69,70,71 Spurs for Doctors, 72 Old Physic dreads skilful Mothers, 73 Homoeopathic Khus stops 30,000 Colds, 74 Board of Health ignores Ehus, 76 Arnica tends wounded Thousands, 78, 79 Homoeopathy prevents Cholera, 80 Board of Health ignores Homoeopathy, 81 Homoeopathy cures Cholera, 82 Homoeopathy cures Sea-sick Armies, 83, 84 Homoeopathy curea Ague and Fever, 85, 86 Arnica cures the Moil of Fatigue, 87, 88 Old Physic can't give General Orders, 89, 90 Homoeopathy can give General Orders, 91 Woman and Homoeopathy, 92, 93, 94 Doctor Elizabeth BlackweU, 95 The Ladies in the Field, 96, 97, 98, 99 Florence Nightingale, 100 Doctor Smith's Beatitudes, 102 Old Physic against the Russians, 103, 4 The Pharisee butters his Victim, 105, 6 The more Haste the worse Speed, 107, 8 Old Physic spends Four Million of ours, 109 Priceless Worth of one Specific, 113, 14 Grief has its Tides, 115, 16 Ignatia heals Wounds of Sorrow, 117, 18 Old Physic leaves the Mind out, 119, 20 Old Physic leaves the World out, 121 Homoeopathy sits with the Age, 122 Decrees for the Health Minister, 123 Health Minister wins his Spurs, 124 The Country's Industry thanks him, 125 He summons the Board of Health, 128 Natural Death reappears, 129, 30 The Earth chimes in, 131 State Medicine is born, 132 Ancient Wisdom speaks, 133 The Wolf is bound, 134 The Health Minister on Fisgah, 135 Only let us do our Duty, 137 Appendix. WAB, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. SIR, AND MY COUNTRYMEN, 1. Public casualties open the world's heart and eyes, insure the |X progress of decent fairness, bring mankind to books, 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 rig! 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 inflic- tion laid on ? 2. There cannot be a doubt that sin is the effectual caller of all misery, and that the cholera is a consequence 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 o which I shall try to bring home to you, in order that their special repentance, and a regeneration thereafter, may be insured. Other re- pentances are urged by other appointed voices, and to them also let us respond, Amen. 3. The British nation, like every other in Christendom, contains within it many solid and compact organizations which have come from old times, and which have well nigh all power in several great departments of action and thought. Among 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 con- tinual siege against its own times and peoples; and what is termed reform is always accompanied by the razing of some part of their out- works, 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 ne- cessity, which identifies these towers of the past with our straightness, our evils, and our sins ; and preaches a brave, God-fearing self-reli- ance, and a fresh appeal to the sword of our spirits in the great Battle of Facts. The medical profession, with its black, innumerable dun- geons, is at present brought, by the benignant pestilence, 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. 4. 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 any thing healing, but the whole Pharmacopeia rushes with noisome velocity through this mis- erable art. Convulsed and blue-cold, half death and half physic, it (3) WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 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. 5. And if it is ill to death in this wise, agreeing in its several mem- bers upon no remedy, but spasmodic towards 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. 6. That such is the fact there can be no doubt. A short consider- ation 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 populations 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, throw down its prey into the pits of cholera, and makes recovery nearly hopeless. Ay, and when the attack occurs, the fight for life is on the same field of natural chances. If artificial depressants in the shape of drugs are poured into the system, the opportunities of life are still further con- tracted. Especially is this the case with opium, brandy, and stimu- lants, 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 ? 7. Sir, and my countrymen ! they have a shrewd suspicion of this themselves, and accordingly, to their honor though not their glory, in all public considerations 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 cleanliness, which makes their adventitious dirt 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, how- ever, come ; and our cholera doctors employ 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 drainmaker, call in the chloride of lime maker, the butcher, baker, publican, and the rapid shell and 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-abrogation. WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 5 8. 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 preven- tion, the clothing and food prevention, and the thousand scaffoldings that support the great arising palace of human health, in the presence of disease, the unbuilder, are the contribution of numerous other call- ings, and do not await the impertinent 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 recommendation 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 show you in the sequel; but the present point is, that if the medical man knows nothing of any safeguard of the kind, he has quitted his post, to which thenceforth others must be appointed. 9. Nursed and reared in and to the medical profession, there is a rapidly growing set of dissentients called the Homosopaths, who alone offer to occupy the place which the "infallible" profession has ceded. Alive with faith born of experience, standing upon the ever- lasting and ever-living rock of facts, they know that they have medi- cal or healing powers equal to the emergency of pestilence, and are willing to put them to the proof on fair terms of trial, such as will 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 house top have cried it forth with all their might to all whom it concerns ; but they have cried to stopped ears and scornful faces. 10. Let me here make an extract from a paper on cholera put forth by the British Homoeopathic Association, and which gives a few statistics in point, as follows : TREATED AT THEIR OWN HOUSES. Results of Allopathic or ordinary treatment of Cholera. Cases. Deaths. At Tischnowitz, in Moravia. . 331 102 " Wishney, Wototschok, in Russia 199 139 " Merseburg. 164 101 " Raab. in Hungary, . . .1217 578 In various cavalry regiments in Great Britain. ... 171 54 " the troops at Gibraltar, . 459 131 " the troops at Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, . 210 59 . " the troops in Canada, . . 356 127 3107 1291 About one death in every 2 l-3d cases, . more than 39 per cent. Results of Homoeopathic treatment of Cholera. Cages. Death*. By Dr. Baer, at Prague, . . 80 " Dr. Bakody, at Raab, in Hungary, 154 6 " Dr. Duplat, at Marseilles, 60 12 " Dr. Gerstel. at Tischnowitz, in Moravia, 327 32 " Dr. Hanusch, at Tischnowitz, 84 6 " Dr. Kliener, at Saratof, in Russia, 183 Dr. Jal, at Marseilles, . Dr. Lederer, at Vienna, . Dr. Lens, at Pesth. . . Dr. Lichtenfels, at Vienna, DY Lovy, at Prague, . . Dr. Marenzeller, at Vienna, Dr. Mayer, at Pesth, . . Dr. Qum. at Tischnowitz and Paris, 48 19 80 40 44 80 30 65 27 4 2 8 3 8 3 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. By Dr. Rummel, at Merseburg, 46 16 " Dr. Schaller, at Prague, .113 " Dr. Schreter, at Lemberg, 27 1 " Dr. Schultz, at Vienna, . 17 " Dr. Scider, at Wishney, Wototschok, in Russia, 109 23 " Dr. Vrecka, at Vienna and Slowitz, 144 12 " Dr. Veith, at Vienna, . . 125 3 1875 169 About one death out of 1 1 cases, or little more than 9 per cent. [It is proper to mention, that these results must not be received without caution, on account of the variations in the intensity of the disorder at different places and periods. In a considerable degree, however, the Homoeopathic statements are sup- ported by testimonials and acknowledgments from local authorities.] TREATED IN HOSPITALS. Casei. Deaths. In the Drummond St. Cholera Hospital, Edinburgh, . . 461 291 " the Cholera Hospital, Ber- lin, under Dr. Bohr, . . 97 64 " Krunkenburgs wards, at Halle, 104 53 " Hamburg Hospitals, Oct. and Nov. 1831, .... 283 178 " the Cholera Hospital, St. Petersburg, by Dr. Lich- tenstadt, 636 317 " the Hospital, Raab, . . .284 122 " the Hospital, Bourdeaux, .104 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. Haynel and Staler, at Berlin, 32 6 " Dr. Mabit, at Bourdeaux, .31 6 795 258 About one death in 3 1-1 Oth cases, or between 32 and 33 per cent. 11. " From the above it will be seen that in private treatment 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 Homoeopathy ; an astounding difference in the first description of cases, and a very re- markable difference also in the latter, although it is to be borne in mind that patients are only brought to a hospital when they show undoubted evidence of the fully developed disease, many after having been subject to a very violent treatment, and having been dosed with Allopathic med- icines, 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 Homeopathic Dispensary, from the 4th October, 1848, to the 1st February, 1849, received since the first publication of this Circular, gives the following 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 cases treated at Edinburgh and Leith during the same period, is as follows : WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 7 12. " In Wilde's Austria, its Literary, Scientific, and Medical Institutions,* 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. Fleischmann recovered, two thirds of those treated by the ordinary methods in the other hospitals died. This very extraordinary result led Count Kolowrat (Minister of the Interior) to repeal the law relative to the practice of Homogopathy^ The hospital in question, it should be added, was daily visited by two Allopathic inspect- ing physicians appointed by the government. Dr. Roth, of Mulfich, also, who was sent by the Bavarian government to observe the cholera in dif- ferent localities, and report on the effects of its Homoeopathic treatment, published, in 1833, an interesting pamphlet, which has furnished a con- siderable portion of the statistics above detailed. The statistics from Tischnowitz, 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 beea a medical practitioner in the Allopathic school, but was at the time when the cholera raged at Vienna, Chaplain to the Court and to St. Stephen's Cathedral, and whilst administering the consolations of religion to those infected with cholera, he was shocked at the awful mortality that prevailed ; and the idea of treating them according to the Homosopathic system, with which he was already familiar, occurred to him. His success was so great, that of 125 patients he lost but 3." 13. It would be easy to add to the above lists similar results from all the great towns of Europe and America 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 shows 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, July, 1854,) has treated 629 cases of cholera, and accompanies his results with admirable statistics : the gross ratio of deaths being 30 percent. 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. 14. One would have thought that facts like these, not alas marvel- lous 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 Homoeopathy invites them on every side. On the Cases. Cured. Deaths. Under treatment. 876 271 546 59 Proportion of deaths to cures, as two to one. Or, supposing the cases treated Homceopathically, and which were- daily reported to the authorities, to have been included in the General Return, their deductions would show a proportion of deaths to cures of five to one under Allopathic treat- ment. * This is the work of an Allopathic surgeon, the talented editor of the Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medicine. 8 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. contrary, on they go from unsurety to unsurety, experimenting in the same fruitless direction, and sedulously avoiding every path that pro- fesses to lead away from their unsuccess. For this they have many pretexts. 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 different from their own. This is a very common 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 whooping cough cut short, were straightway pronounced to be not whooping cough, because under Homoeopathy they had not lasted six months the proper Allopathic duration. So inflamma- tion of the lungs was not rightly diagnosed was not inflammation, because aconite and bryonia infinitesimals had cured it ; whereas the orthodox had barely cured a proportion of such cases fry bleeding and mercury enough to kill. So that they have a ready way of lim- iting what can be done in disease to precisely what they can do. A very pretty teachableness for a progressive art. It reminds me of a man I met in Paris this autumn, to whom I told that I had gone to Bourdeaux in a day of thirteen hours. He said it could not be Bour- deaux 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 Bourdeaux 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 tell- ing him that I had gone in a travelling town drawn by a huge tea- kettle with a coal scuttle for my two horses. And now he declared that I was mad. I found however 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 railroad was com- ing: 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 whooping 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 Homoeopathy 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 ? 15. 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. Ensconced 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, Tlie Times, Tlie Lancet, and WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. Athenceum: its disgraces are the occasions on which it distributes stars and garters from its seat of honor ; if the Homoeopaths come with an embassy to any of its outer gates, it proclaims in characters of crooked fists, " exterminate the barbarians, and let them be extermi- nated : away with the foreign devils." Nor does there appear to be any thing but public opinion collaring and deposing it, that will bring their great Fe Fo Fum to the knowledge conveyed by the natural senses. 16. Its mighty General, Whang Hum, commonly known as The Times, standing Lord High Commissioner to all orthodoxy which wishes to be hoaxed, laced Beadle of Fogydom, is bamboozled by it, and bamboozles it, as is the usual case with despots and their tools. Lately I endeavored to be admitted to the presence of this big per- sonage, 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 pub- lic station, as moulding the opinions of millions, they had done their thorough duty, had given every thing 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 alleviate the dis- pensations 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 chol- era appeared 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, The Times has got its occupa- tion, to wander about dirty places with a brimstone dredging box, and pepper fungi, The Times, the yellow-powdered gentleman's gentleman, the Jeames of the medical clubs, The 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 Idetermined to write to it, and ask it about Homreopathy. " 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 cures, and treatment, by Homoe- opathy did not appear in print at all ! I had been led to anticipate as much. Of course many letters had been cushioned before mine. 2 10 AVAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. And then I was told, but sense and duty would not let me off the trouble of writing on that account, that The Times was dead 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. 17. Sir, and my Countrymen ! is not the moral of all this, strange, old, and edifying ? Here is a grand perplexity 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 badness ; the population, the med- ical profession, and the journals, rushing about in panic terror for something, any thing, 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 their tails; some with wild uplifted faces imploring Hercules Chadvvick 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 sinner is perfectly ready to cede every thing 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. " Any thing you please, gentlemen," saith The Times, " but such truths. Away with them, away with Homoeopathy." 18. Pretexts of course are easily raised to show how right and proper it is to blink the convincing facts in favor of Homoeopathy, and to decide against it because 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 existing malady. Must is a mighty fellow, but often easily "crumpled up" by unceremonious practice. Experi- ence 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 hindermost place of all. The allegation of the impos- sibility of Homoeopathy is then in every physical sense a kind of madness, and may be dismissed as such. And now let us attend to WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 11 a second pretext, that the Homoeopathic means are " inadequate." The argument runs thus : Here is Mr. So and So, most near and dear to me, attacked by cholera : can I trust him to infinitesimal doses, which seem quite like doing nothing ? The circumstances are terrible : the means of assistance look small indeed. First, how run the facts ? The old way of treatment, whose means looking formi- dably great, consisting of huge stores of drugs, many of them produ- cing instant effects of poison and death, unmistakable signs of a certain power, loses professedly, as to-day's Times states, (October 4th,) 65 out of 100 cholera cases. If this treatment, bulky and po- tential, be not inadequate, what is ? I have already shown you that medicine here does not do nothing, only because it does mischief. The Homoeopathic treatment cures 70 out of the 100, or a larger pro- portion. Here the inadequacy is far less. Let me recall to you that power and violence are different things, but that violence and weak- ness are, for gbod ends, generally the same. 'Tis so in other things, why 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 grad- uated 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 vulgar bully in the medical shops : great cures deter- mine the only greatness which sick men, or their guardians, can rec- ognize in medicine. I dismiss this, of inadequacy, as being but a reflection of the confusion of those with whom inadequacy is the everlasting luck. 19. A third count in the medical brief against Homceopathy re- mains to be noticed ; the allegation that its known success is due to Nature, and that it might pYofitably go even farther, and instead of giving infinitesimals give clean nothing. It is remarkable that all these charges are true of the accuser true of the old system of med- icine. It would be better that it should do nothing than fill the human constitution with poisons. But its recommendation to Na- ture is, to say the least, very suspicious. Like some doubtful char- acter 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 inquire how and when they have been honored with her familiarity. She is abroad in all weathers, 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 surreptitiously 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 calomel- ized in a manner that showed at once that they thought they were 12 WAR, CHOLERA, AND TIIK MINISTRY OF HEALTH. playing with a bowelless costume : but this is the very nearest they have come to nature so far as my knowledge goes. The Dame her- self has ordered them from her sight, from the beginning. Eyes, ears, nose, mouth, all her lofty and all her lowly features, each fibre of her self-sustaining and universal frame, abhors, repudiates and out- spews their druggeries and violations, and names them swindlers when they claim her friendship. Yet, perhaps, by her they mean somebody else! 20. 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 according to the moral state of the users. Now, thought I, cpvw is the Greek for nature ; hence our word, physics, meaning the sciences versed about our world ; hence comes physic, the science of medicine ; a part of knowledge, a kingly part, put by met- aphor for the 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 : which last physic, or drastic purges, are no doubt the phusis the nature, 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 gravitate, and physicking is their goddess. But then how does this square with doing nothing? Inconsistency, let me remark, is a part of many inexact people, and sometimes saves a character : let it now save that of medical science. 21. For nobody can mean that in doing vulgar nothing they are near nature, who, furnished forth by her Maker, does nearly every thing that is done. Were 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 sun 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 con- clusion, and as it were shave nothing very closely. There is the expectant 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, ascertaining for philosophical transactions the natural duration of fever, whooping cough, and pneumonia ; just as expectant agricul- turists, 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 waving sheets of corn. These doctors belong to a tract of physic recently mapped down : they are in a state of nature, and may be called the aborigines of disease. I believe they will easily move off farther west, as they have no hold on thS soil : like the Choctaws and the Chippewas 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 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 13 nursing on account of the very defect, or annulment, of the medical or higher art. So that our expectants or savages will not pass out of the world without a remnant being saved, or good accruing. The Ruler of things brings this out of their laziness. The assiduity of the nurses compensates for the flight of the physicians. This is a second example of the desertion of medicine which we before chron- icled, when we noticed that public health had come entirely to be a question of draining, and other non-medical preventive means. 22. You all of you remember the story of the lawyer who con- ducted the case of a man who had borrowed some useful article from a neighbor, kept it an unconscionable 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 third, that it was cracked at the time it was lent. The charges against Homoeopathy are much of this cross tis- sue. 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 producing them is imagination and fancy, whicli 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 Homosopathy not less than Christians of maturity. And babies and horses, though undoubtedly they have imagination, and are fanciful enough, yet do not imagine in the direction of cure: which is what the Allopathists want for their hypothesis. That the case is so with infants, I aver on my own experience, and that of hundreds 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 rny 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 Homospathic cap, that its opponents charge us with having possession of the imagination of our public: just as it is the sure sign of the extreme downfall of our adversaries, that the imagination 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 ap- proaching the threshold of the man of health. Cures by Homoeopathy have created the imagination of which the Allopathists 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 suffering faces upwards to the azure 14 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. lands of hope. This imagination, by the wonderful connection of the mind with the body, is not only the prophet, but in part the real- ization, of a new-born health. There is not a single successful calling on earth that lives an hour without its own department of this great imagination ; and when the doctors accuse the Homoeopaths of hav- ing it, they only show that they themselves are out of the circle of live arts and sciences, and active citizens altogether. 23. 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 them- selves to imagination better than grosser quantities. I can't help it, 'tis an undoubted law of nature. If you can see too much, the mind has less suggestion room. I note a few perfectly sweet glob- ules 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 confectionary universes. On the other hand, I stumble across a bottle of salts and senna ; the filthy smell, the nauseous 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 eyes, nose and mouth : I know they 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. 24. Well, but there is another quite different accusation 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, mix 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 administers them in considerable quantities. I challenge them to bri'ng 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 mag- nesia 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 Ham, 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. WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 15 25. Before quitting this interesting thesis, the imagination, I will discurse so far as to aver that the whole class of fanciful patients are just those who are the most difficult to act upon with Homoeopathic medicines. There is indeed a broad distinction between the imagi- native and fanciful classes. The former are no doubt liable to per- manent impressions which may run on into fixed ideas that set medi- cinal 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 medicines. 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 interference on the part of the restless and quick mind with the organization, that not only are the effects of medicines cancelled, but it is difficult to com- mand 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 activity in the body at once, the power of fancy is drained of its vigor, and the real malady comes on the scene in its physical predom- inance. In this case such patients are as readily treated and cured as other persons. I experience this every day, and note in it a con- vincing 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, aud 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. 26. 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 Psychology and mental treat- ment, when they put forth that morbid mind affords facilities to any method of cure. 27. 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 inter- dict : otherwise 1 believe chiefly in variety, and allo\v temperance the run of the kitchen and the cellar. In acute cases, fevers and inflam- mations, the patient's instincts generally diet him sufficiently; he tongs for water and diluents ; and these are allowed by every body. In diet then there is very little difference between us and the old prac- titioners ; and the corollary is that our superior success is due solely to the superiority of the Homoeopathic medicines. 28. 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 exploded reasons brought forward, you now cheer- 16 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. fully accept our artless explanation ; that we 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 ap- plause 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. 29. 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 diseases. 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 healing 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 scep- tics 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 ad- vanced 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, excepting 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 destroying that which is meant to pass away. But in the mean time 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 suffering and the sick. I can only say, Sir, and my Coun- trymen, that before I knew Homoeopathy I was in daily moral perplex- ity 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 necem) yet were both barbarous and questionable, added fresh stings to disease, took away nature's chance, accelerated 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 at- tendants, with all soft dealing, with every principle of cleanliness and sweetness, that I could not but feel like a disturber and a violent man in recommending and superintending them on many a well-remem- bered occasion. Oftentimes I would gladly not have been called in under such circumstances ; for though I was not fully conscious of the fact, I now know, alive as I am and renewed by faith in Homoe- opathy, that 1 did not believe in the medical art. What a load, what a moral load is removed from me now ; what a delight there is in medical practice ; what counter cheers from my own heart answering the cheer of uninjured convalescents. And where I cannot cure, and cannot retard decease, I have done no mischief, and introduced no WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 17 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 win 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. 30. Each man, Sir, and my Countrymen, as he writes 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, corne down to us re- newed by Homosopathy, 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. Quantity in drugs fails to cure sickness, and quantity in doctors will be no more successful, though in solid-looking squares of infantry of Apoth- ecaries 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. 31. 1 must still further notice to you another dodge of those who dream against Homoeopathy ; the common saw, that it is all very well in chronic diseases, but inapplicable to emergencies and acute cases. The 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 positive 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, Homoeopathy too will do more than any thing else. My assertion is borne out by hun- dreds of practitioners in all parts of these islands, of the British pos- sessions, 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 experience 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 stereotyped smiles, mes- merism and the rest : and these practitioners have an abundant clientry, who are not used to run away from them to the violent inefficacious people, whenever disease is sharp and sudden. More- over, these Homoeopaths are the only evidence proffered 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 Homo3opathy ; 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 evidence then is a sufficient reply o 18 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. to the unbased thought, that Homoeopathy cannot tackle acute diseases. 32. I see, however, in the thought an entire scepticism of the powers of medicine on the part of the Allopaths. If drugs have any power over a disease lasting for months and years, and whose roots therefore are of terrible tvvistiness and oaken toughness, is it likely they should be impotent over mushroom inflammations, mere ebullitions -of the blood, caused by cold, anger, grief, and other mo- mentary 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 prob- ability 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. 33. Here let me say a word about the only way of investigating Homoeopathy. If you merely wish to know what the facts of th6 case are, you must receive them from those who have elicited them, and whose testimony, world-wide, is unopposed. You cannot gain- say them : you might as well deny the statistics of the Board of Health, or the tables of meteorological observations. This is how- ever but a passive reception, 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 farther, 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 success- ful aim with a drug lightens it up from the great sun of facts, and engraves its angel property of relief on your soul forever : 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 transaction 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 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 19 this ordeal: they are in very fact those who have some other calling without knowing it, and do not wish to enter on this profession, yet have an unfortunate hanker against it which spoils them for their own vocation. 34. But failing utterly to show that Homoeopathy is either impos- sible, improbable, inadequate, slow or unready, they turn round upon its practitioners, and assert that they are men who could not get on in the old practice, and that therefore they have taken refuge in Homoeopathy as one of the last forms of quackery. I am fond of making a proper admission on this head. It is indeed true and after- wards likely that the men who can study and apply the exquisite sys- tem 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 word 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 shoeblack, and a clum- sy stableman. And so most surely a fitness for Homoeopathic practice will cause the possessor to fall short, both in skill and success, of the jog-trot Allopathist, 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 lower to the higher station is likely to be accompanied with some excellent incompetency of the kind. 35. They say too that the Homoeopaths have added nothing to medical science: by which science they mean their own jogtrot. Posterity however will not be slow to acknowledge that Hahnemann has created therapeutical medicine, by furnishing it with a central law r round which the healing facts and instances of ages, revolve ; which has a new breadth of inductive basis like the other new pro- gressive sciences ; and a coextensive 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 al- ready 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 of similia similibus curantur is no cold abstraction, but di- rectly 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 : 20 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. nothing more unitedly creditable to the heart and head of a great discoverer, than this principle announced by the lips of Hahnemann. 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 con- crete and practical as well as an exact science this science of the correspondence of therapeutics with practical healing. 36. Perhaps however without an example you are hardly aware of what I mean by this principle and this correspondence. Let me then illustrate. Ipecacuanha is a drug familiarly known to cause vomit- ing ; and in Hahnemann's proving a number of other affections. 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 Ipecacuanha. Yet another instance. Tobacco (tabacum) produces depression and -deadly faintness on those unused to it; and there is, to my knowledge, no more likely remedy for those states, often cur- ing them at once, and preventing their recurrence, than this very ta- bacum. 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 other- wise it would directly increase the disease, going specifically as it does to the very atoms of the diseased part. 2. Because in the in- finitesimal 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. 37. We see therefore in thus giving the symptoms produced by drugs, that we are collecting the precise means of extinguishing dis- eases ; and by the proving 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 anal- ogy with symptoms produced by medicines, will be brought under control? Most clearly so. And as all mental and moral affections also produce physical effects on the organism, these effects can be reached by the same means ; and the causes at all events be pre- vented from producing lasting derangements in the body. Mental diseases belong to a different department, but they too are in a de- gree prevented from waxing when their natural feet are taken away in the removal of their bodily correspondents. 38. 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 heightening his powers 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 at- tacking disease with a charmed new medicine and alkahest distilled out of that dragon's blood, is an affair that builds the very bones and WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 21 flesh of the race, prepares new generations of health with successive births, and is properly the foundation, plasma and recipient of all other benefits of art and science, and of all benefactions of God. 39. But besides that Homoeopathy has created Materia Medica, you will also find that it has placed symptomatology, 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 classification. These 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. Homoeopathy does not do this, because it wants precise symptoms to correspond with the precision it has at- tained in the effects of drugs upon the system ; and these symptoms it takes from the reliable lips of the patient himself. Accordingly it alone embraces the true and particular chronicles of disease. In con- sequence, 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 breathing and the rhythm of the beating. So in Homoeopathy, you take the pa- tient's words as a kind of tube which reveals to your very ear the universal condition of his morbid sensations. A vast and untrodden region also now awaits future medical discoverers here, in the corre- spondence 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 fore- head, 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 hu- mane method of setting some store by the patient's own account of his feelings. 40. 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 healthgiving, are also laboring earnestly at the proving and winning of new drugs, that fill their places in the great chart of remedial science. Such are the additions to Materia Medica of la- chesis, 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 this to show that in Homoeopathy, we have a progressive science and a progressive art. 22 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. This is not the case with old physic. A progressive science is one which, on the foundation of to-day, builds the basement of to-mor- row, 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 Sun- day : 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, Homoe- opathy is older than what calls itself orthodoxy, which dates its con- stant year 1, from the last new discoveries of chemistry. Homoeop- athy, on the other hand, holds what it has, and by the constant liv- ing 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. 41. Sir, and my Countrymen, I have troubled you with something very like a squabble, and bandied words with old physic in your offi- cial parlor, because, for other reasons, and besides that we have been provoked, 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 functions, and in- terfered with the ediles and the street sweepers, he comes with the loudest double raps at the door of Parliament, to request that his va- cant chair may be kept vacant and still called his ; and that all un- qualified practitioners, and all branches of healing, unrecognized by his clubs, may be summarily dealt with. Whoso is not " registered " in his book of life, is to be hauled before a magistrate, and dismissed the neighborhood 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 prac- tice " means, if any thing, practice according to certain rules previously laid down, but where, O ! ye sharpest sighted, arc the rules in the old practice of medicine? I know of no rules approximating to any thing 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 sev- enty out of the hundred is by the aggravating fact of thirty-live citi- zens saved, an irregular practitioner. Be it enacted that two hun- dred 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 vio- lated ; and some Homceopathist will have to bear the brunt of hav- ing outraged the old colleges by rescuing 110 French sailors from a water burial. 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 widest liberty to all kinds of practice. The wildest freaks of in- vention cannot be more deadly than the orthodox rules. No quack. WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 23 even if he came at the head of a battalion, each man carrying a re- volver, and declared that his patent consisted in the discharge of its pills among the 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. 42. Nothing can be gained by putting down what you please to call quacks. There are many men and women, who from circum- stances cannot obtain a diploma, but who have a medical eye in their heads worth a thousand times the sigillum maximum of the best col- lege upon earth. A Preissnitz is an example that shines with its own unborrowed light, and shows that nature is the fountain of every pro- fession, 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 ped- antry, and sink occasionally into the false estate o.f rules and ruts : but where their instincts and their humanity are awake and active, they are safe and healing. Their murders by pedantry, though lam- entable, are as nothing to those which take place on the old plan. 43. 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 to add S.D., or Self-Dubbed ; or N.M.D.C.R. Lond. : the N signifying Non; or indeed 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 see, and whom they may choose to call in. By this means credentials will 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 jurisdiction await those who, after reasonable notice, are not duly registered. Let also the taking of an unauthorized title be a case of swindling. The regis- tration 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. 44. There is no more reason, Sir, why Government should directly patronize one kind of medical education, and destroy the practice of those medical practitioners who have not received it, than why they should grant privileges to one set of bakers, landlords, or butchers, and declare all others irregular. Happily nowadays, honesty and competency have so far gained a standing, that they will take care of 24 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. themselves without the props of Government patronage ; and the di- ploma 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 respectability of it- self should overbear all other more native gifts ; and this will continue to be the case long after medicine has entered the splendid 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 enterprise ; and this kind of central and lifegiving energy is the only thing that ought to be protected by the State. The protection consists in the maintenance of entire liberty. 45. Were the contrary system to be carried out, according to the wish of the old profession, medical science would walk 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 Ho- moeopaths were destroyed by it, the least routine of the old doctors would begin to be eyed savagely by their more orthodox fellows : the last set of allopathic ideas and experiments would give up the ghost under the hangman's noose. Then another batch of more timid nov- elty 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 surgeons and centenarian physicians would represent the medical profession. Wakley and Co. ' would be the Last Man left blooming alone; tearful roses of the 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 demolishing all medical heresies, is to involve the sanguinary Lance^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 work- house lies. 46. 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 forever. Religious dissent is not only allowed ; but any one can be Reverend who pleases ; provided, I presume, he does not take a false title, and commit an act of swindling. Mean- time, 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 have 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 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 25 and a pair of official beadle's breeches with nobody in them,) called Regular Practice? 47. 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 connection of medicine with the State like the connection of Church and State, her most gracious Majesty Queen Victoria, God bless her, must then become Defender of the Pharmacopoeia, as she is now Defender of the Faith. Regina, Defensor Fidei, necnon et Pharmacopoeia Londinensis ! The very penny pieces would blush in their brazen faces to find her sacred im- age so associated. The pockets of every one of us, if not made of impudence or asbestos, would be scorched into holes by the burning 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 Country- men, so weak, or indeed so mad, every other calling in the empire would, on principle, exact a similar connection. The Queen would become, by consent of her poor checkmated 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 disconnected from her most gracious Majesty ; the Church in a body would join the Dissenters, and the Archbishop of Canterbury contu- maciously preach in Ebenezer Chapel on alternate Sundays with Rev. Lohaire Stratekutt ; and all this ruin would have been effected to please Mr. Brady and his aiders and abetters of the old medical schools. Thus conservatism and medical Puseyism would in the end turn out to be revolution ; a word and a thing which every good cit- izen abhors. Heaven and Lord Palmerston defend us from so dread a crisis ! 48. How is it, Sir, that other branches of human activity flourish in this energetic country ? Assuredly by no government protection. It is a law of British nature, perhaps of universal Man, that wherev- er 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 doc- trines, or to cotton, or breadstuffs, there is neither contrast nor comparison, nor consequently emulation, but a single unvarying method of production, and a single result. Society, made up of di- verse 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 improvement and alteration of the individual. All this has be- come so trite now, and in the most material sphere, that I must apol- ogize 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 with physic. 4 26 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OP HEALTH. 49. It has been too often thought that institutions create the handi- crafts 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 heart's 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 na- tion has them burning in the deep kilns of its subterrene, more pow- erfully than Britain, and hence the quantity of proverbial wisdom directly aiming to remove impediments to their gratification. "A clear stage and no favor" is one of these saws ; 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 hinderance, is the single point to be attained : and this is best done by Government assuming as its grand end, individual 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 la- tent instinct brought to bear, is small compared with that which is smothered by the circumpressure of old habits, guilds and conven- tionalities; which act upon the genius of a nation much as Chinese nurses upon the feet of female infants, and stunt it into ugly Chinese beauty. If, therefore, you want more display of the genius of phy- sic, 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 phy- sicians 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. 50. It is manifest too, that the quantity of healing in a commu- nity suffers 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 numerous oth- er cultivators whose genius incites them to other departments. In this way, while a profession seems to be full, it may really be over- stocked 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 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 27 leave Nature's and Providence's work to them, but undertake it with- out the means of fulfilling it. Such is exactly the case with medi- cine at present. Drugs and dosers there are in abundance, and straightway the cry is, that the science and art of healing are over- stocked ; whereas 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 undoubt- edly to be laid to the door of the monopolies 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 resources. 51. 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 jury. The question will be as to the injury inflicted by his incompetency, violence, or neglect. I do not anticipate that the actions against non-licentiates of colleges will become more numerous than at present; for probably there will then be fewer practising non-licentiates than now, because medical education will become immeasurably less expensive. But there will, I expect, be for a few years a considerable increase of law proceedings against the regular practitioners. For as other bodies will have come into the field on a perfectly equal footing, bodies that use no violent means, no corrosive drugs, no health-sapping mercurials 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 did school, in their own horror of drugging and its effects ; and a public, so tempered, will, it may easily be foreseen, /resent the frequent cases of physical ruin from drugs and bleedings |occurring among its valued members. Many new legal questions | will thus doubtless arise: as this for instance : whether a man is not [ entitled to compensation for having lost a week's work, or a year's I 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 insuring his speedy recovery. 2. Whether a case of bleeding, 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 pretences. 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 treat- ment, when Homoeopathy would have cured the sickness without, and left the teeth standing ? 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, 28 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. and which left him worse than it found him, pins a Hernia for the surgeon to take care of? I 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 mur- derous old practice of medicine. Parliament ought to be prepared for these cases, of which no doubt it will have warning in the per- plexities 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 poi- sons. 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 mat- ters profitably, and can make no good use of them, but may do terri- ble 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 rat's 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. 52. 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 modifying the institutions that have grown up under the despotism of the colleges. It is well known what a 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 affect- ed by surgery, however, the case is different ; and assuredly numerous operations are annually performed by adroit s'urgeons that are not warranted by medical laws. Surgery is the residuum and caput mortuum of physic; what other skill cannot cure is left for the knife. Hence the amount of surgical 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 therapeutical means, it follows that operations are in the main not justifiable, until the patients have had the better chance afforded by Homo3opathic treatment. To be operated on at the dictum of an Allopath, is as if ,a prisoner were to be condemned by a coroner'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 Ailopathist ought to do, is to commit a patient for operation ; the WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 29 Homosopathist alone should sentence him to undergo it. Hence the public necessity, in the interest of the poor, of superadding, by au- thority of Parliament, a coequal Homo3Opathic 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 Homreopaths, 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 dis- allow all and singular operations on the human frame ; and to pre- vent dapper surgeons from cutting off what they can't put on again ; and this is all the more necessary, since chloroform has rendered operations 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 Home- opaths 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 re- sponsibility of great operations on to their shoulders. Should it unfortunately happen that the medical officers of any existing hos- pital are contumacious, and repudiate their new colleagues, Parlia- ment can provide for the case, accept their resignation, and decree that the whole staff may be occupied by the Homoeopathic corps. 53. I do not limit these remarks to cases ordinarily regarded as medical and constitutional, such as cancer, scrofulous swellings of the knee, tumors, and the like ; for in fact accidents in their treat- ment 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 vulnerary remedies, i. e., medicaments that have a direct 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 obviating the bad effects of bruises and wounds of all sorts ; nay, also of bodily fatigue : that rhus toxicodendron has a similar power over strains, sprains, injuries of ligaments and tendons : that calendula, the com- mon marigold, does the like Christian office for deep wounds in which much flesh is lost; promoting their filling up, and obviating the extent of scars : and that symphytum, (the common great comfrey,) 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 repair 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 Homoeopathic brethren I see those powers in benignant action every day. Now what are we to think of the fact, that the London hospi- tals ignore all these things, and have nothing to put in their places : * Solomon's seal, the common daisy, all the stonecrops, eyebright, tamus com- munis, and hundreds of other herbs are wound herbs ; known as such to the rustics, but unknown to the medical profession. 30 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. nothing but saturnine lotions, calomel, purges, leeching, bloodtaking, and other remedies for inflammation that would never have arisen, had aconite and arnica been employed in the Homoeopathic way. Such a fact brings 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 superciliousness, 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 re- covery, 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 su ill-rings not unlike those caused by mechanical injuries; and hence, if exhibited in large doses, (as was, I understand, the case in the pro- fessed 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 Homoeopathic way, of attenuated dilutions, and infinitesimals; it must be superintended by a skilful Homoeopathist, 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 become " converted characters," or a Homoeo- pathic staff is appointed to them, to oversee and correct at least that part of their practice. 55. I look forward with great interest to the Parliamentary action, led on by Mr. Brady, on this important question. The thing is so manifestly humane, that it would be uncharitable to doubt the speedy intervention 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 body, they will be converted to the hospitals, think of them kindly when they are well ; toast them with grateful recollec- tions, 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. 56. On a single other ground also, and one of the most considerate kind, I would base my advocacy of the introduction of a Homoeo- pathic 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 Hoimropathy. To ascertain this would be very important ; 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 influence the medical WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 31 officers by showing them the practice most in demand. If Allopathy went to the wall in this way, they could not say it was any thing but fair : people have a right to call in whom they please : there was no demand for the article, and it would 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 bedridden allopathized 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 re- mote from each other; and the benefit of comparison and contrast is lost. Shall not science be entitled (by Parliament, led on by Mr. Brady) to receive the edifying spark of their collision ? 57. I would give the world myself to be present in the waiting room for out patients, after the two classes of patients are duly re- ceived together : to see the passions, emotions, conditions, that could 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 would 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 im- portant scene, which will assuredly take place one day in our grave infirmaries ; though whenever that day dawns, the laughter cure will show how various nature is in her possibilities of restoration. 58. Now, Sir, and my Countrymen, a good general takes into ac- count the hinderances 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 fore- casting, has reserves of courage stationed 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 32 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. have the powerful assistance of Parliament led on by Mr. Brady, I would humbly propose another strategy, should the Allopathic for- tress not capitulate at once. The mode has succeeded already with 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 inquire into the effects of drugs and the drugging si/stem, 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 medical reform. The public will be deeply inter- ested in it, which is more than can be said of the Parliamentary action upon medical titles and registration, which, though transacted in the highest court, is nothing more than the echo of professional squab- bles. A material part of the inquiry may consist in returns of the imports and vend, by the great drug houses, of calomel, opium, iodine, drastic purges, narcotic extracts generally, and all the more virulent drugs ; also of the quantities of the same consumed in the great hospi- tals respectively. This will give an approximative 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 gentlemen associated with them to make the proper astuteness up, will devise the means of procuring impartial evidence with a mastership of which I can have no idea. In the mean time it is clear, as they wish to learn the effects of drugging on the sick, and as the allopathic doctors, though sick enough, are pro- verbial for not taking their* own medicines, that it will not be neces- sary to put any direct questions to the medical profession. At best it may be enough to query one or two renowned physicians, just to ascertain what can be said, but with no view to the facts of the case. It is the patients of the United Kingdom who have to depose how they feel and are after the drugs. 59. Probably the masters of great factories might be useful wit- nesses 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 population. 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 ; whether, for example, a little opium pill gave, in. any determinable ratio, a taste for a little bigger piece of opium after- wards, and laid the foundation for opium eating or laudanum drink- WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 33 ing : and whether the supply 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 inquire whether 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, partic- ularly as they now include patients of various systems ; and it might be seen whether the allopathized 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 ham- lets, where doctors are few ; and above all, of any remote oases where there are none at all: details respecting the longevity of the popula- tion 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 in- stances 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 answer of the public to the inquiry ; but the putting of the questions would cause a great deal of medical thought, and true sanitary 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 wholesome 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. 60. 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 med- ical treatment upon the teeth, and hence upon the powers of masti- cation -and digestion ; whether the drug system stands in any denned relation to caries ; and whether, upon the whole, they regard Allo- pathy 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 offices, to ask them whether any preference exists for taking the policies of Allopathic over Homoeopathic patients ; or which way the matter runs. It is obvious 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 themselves round each query, and a well- stored body of witnesses would come down to Westminster to Mr Brady. 61. It will be better to manage the matter thus quietly, at a green- o 34 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 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 inevita- ble shorthand, 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 rea- sons I should deprecate a direct appeal to the feelings of my Country- men on the bleeding and drugging system. Only suppose a Homoeo- pathic Cobden and Bright, appealing from an unwilling and deaf Parliament to the mass of the nation, and instead of providing ample accommodation for tenant farmers, holding out invitation and room for ruined patients ; and what wild passions might, not such danger- ous fellows evoke, what pangs might they not parade, what real Stygian shadows might they not cause td 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 Cob- den, 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 ter- ror. Then the fiery Homoeopathic Bright would fulmine, and he also would announce on sitting down, that he had the satisfaction of intro- ducing another patient : when straightway a throatless grave bird with swelled 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 inexpediency: flocking to a hospital, and shut in mass in its receiving rooms, they are all going to secundem artem; but here they are going to criticism, to complaint, to anger, and inevitable passion. And remember that our new agitators would fly from town to town, placarding, exciting, pathogogizing, printing tracts, collecting sub- scriptions, 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 apostatixe during the next invasion of cholera, and overthrow terra finna 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 Allopathy by direct and clinching legislation. 62. As was the case with the Anti-Slavery Bill, it will be an im- portant 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 forestalKthe 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 ground is, that after the com- mittee has concluded its labors, Allopathy, from what has been WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 35 proved of it, will be so thoroughly suspect, that every death which takes place under it must necessarily become the subject of an in- quest. 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, ex- cept Sundays, Forty Coroners and nearly five hundred coroners' jury- men, besides several hundred chemists and pathologists, and barristers innumerable. Mr. Wakley will be able to inform Parliament how in- convenient this will be, from the experience which he has had in the one or two unsuccessful inquests he held upon those who had died in spite of homoeopathic treatment. It will therefore be better, the im- mediate abolitionists will say, by direct and merciful action, to pre- vent this unseemly overhauling of the allopathic Morgue ; which yet must take place if any respite of years, or even weeks, be injudi- ciously granted to the condemned system. 63. 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 in- quiry 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 Jet them hear the condition of health in those homes. Let them ask the parents whether the series of their "children's diseases" has in- deed 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 without depletions and purgations : whether if the parents are more recent converts to Homoeopathy, they have noticed any bettering in the bodies of their little liocks 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 children, 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, war supports war : but that in Homoeopathy, on the other hand, much cost is indeed incurred at first in parrying the effects of the old treatment left upon the system, in attacking the maladies of nature, and in steadily com- bating constitutional predispositions; but after the first indispensable assiduity of attendance is past, the medical expenses of the family become as a general rule 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. Whether, in short, on the old 3G WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. system, the doctor's bill in unhealthy families does not generally in- crease 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 citixens saved, and funeral expenses saved, be, or be not, a financial consideration of great im- portance in the State ? Mr. Cobden, whom I hereby put upon the com- mittee to intensify the arithmetic of Mr. Brady, will do good service in extracting the marrow of this kind of questions. 01. I also regard the evidence of nurses as of much moment in determining the length of the days of Allopathy. Good nursing is a good part of the battle of Cure. Now nurses may be easily sum- moned 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 ab- sence of the doctor? Is leeching a hard office, and are leech bites apt to bleed too much, and to overdo the blood cure? Is the administra- tion of bolus, pill 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 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 com- mittee ? Are women, after their hour of sorrow, relieved of the con- sequences of nature'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 Allopaths assist nature, who would rather be left alone in that quiet-wanting time ? Are the quantity and quality 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. Go. 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 chok- ingly 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 ex- periences. Our eldest child, a baby then, was attacked in the night with a sudden bronchitis, attended with great wheexing and oppres- sion. My wife, and I sat on end in bed in sanitary conjugal quorum. I ordered ipecacuanha wine as an emetic, and 1 went down stairs to the surgery and fetched it. There it stood by the bedside, and the question was, who should give it? My wife said nothing, and I WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 37 broke a short silence by observing that the medicine was there. She then said, "Well!" 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 ?" 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 denunciation 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 prac- tice, and that this very occasion was sent, partly to oblige me to look into that new thing called Homoeopathy. The upshot of the parti- cular 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 homoeopathic remedy it was ; after which, the oppression of the breath- ing passed away. The circumstance made an impression on my mind, and I now record it, being sure as day, that humble and sim- ple 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 practice enjoins upon you! I see your own health and happiness mantle and rise, as you look at your little ones from the bare contem- plation of so good a riddance. 66. But if the application of the old means be an increase 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 atfected groups, and this must be doubly the case where all means are taken to aggravate 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 Homosopathy gains its chief triumphs by the extinction of the disease within the frame. Of course, therefore, the allopathic method spreads all the loathsome- ness 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 break 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 course calomel every two or three hours ; some too must be bled, and each and all must be well purged many times in the treatment of their cases. Is this nothing, repeated thirty or forty fold in the narrow stifly berths of a ship, where at best, simply misery is triumphant ? 38 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. "What a different picture, Sir, and my Countrymen ! is the homcec* pathic treatment of this same complaint! Pnt 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 eases where there is fever: put twenty drops of tincture of pulsatilla, third dilution, similarly tasteless, into a tumbler of \valer. 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 suc- cession : 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 emi- grant ships as of public moment, I put this also to the labors of the committee, as a matter well deserving their most earnest and Chris- tian inquisition. And if I have the ear of any intending emigrants, I conjure them to go out in no ship, without being provided with a homoeopathic chest, and a book of directions for the treatment of sim- ple diseases. And above all, I advise them to make constant inqui- ries about the chartering of homoeopathic ships, which, as many of the merchant princes of London are in the homeopathic ranks already, is a measure which, with a little setting on foot, may be easily ac- complished. 67. This brings me to the last part of my subject, which concerns more particularly the so called sanitary movement of the day; and now, Sir Benjamin Hall, and my Countrymen, I feel that I dm clos- eted with you in an especial sense. For the present I leave Parlia- ment 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 inde- pendent functions. If you will do what I dictate, by yourselves, you shall have all the credit of it ; for I guaranty that I will tell nobody out of your private circle that I have been the instigator. Sint sua prcemia laudi. 68. 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 edileship ; 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. Bra- dy, into the belief that you are a great medical oflicer, but then on the face of it you have issued no medical directions; you have none such in the background; and all your brightest measures resolve themselves at once into the enforcing of public cleanliness. You will understand me better as I proceed ; but in the mean time let me say, that I honor you extremely in your office, which I believe to be indispensable, and the creation of it a master proof that civilization is advancing. WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 39 69. But, Sir Benjamin, while your board is to the grand edifice of material England what the mistress arid 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 explor- ing the kitchen, or supervising the dusthole, which he expects to form part of the daily work of the occupants ; though if any thing pecu- liarly 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 medicate and diet his cases, certain distinct afflic- tions 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 attendant to an English housewife who had a sick child in bed in the room : and " Sir Benjamin, the drains of Westminster are foul!" would no doubt grate upon you from the Board of Health. This would be precisely because it would be your business that was thus recalled to you by a foreign council. 70. The first business of a Board of Health, Sir Benjamin, in 1854, or in any other year you please, lies in issuing specific direc- tions to the people of Great Britain 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 administra- tions of domestic preventions and remedies. It is obviously v the public doctor also, for medicine and maternity are seen to be one, transfigured both on that high mount of charity and use. 71. 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 practice to the farthest extent which the science of medicine 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 in- cessant, to publish 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 treatment in the first or domestic stages of the disorder. This will be a grand education for the medi- cal men themselves, who will then for the first time become conscious of how far they are quite clear in 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 40 WAR, CHOLF.KA, AM) THK MIMSTRY OF HEALTH. a medical education of the greatest use i<> the community, sharpen- ing 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 proportion 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 refined 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 manufactory of humane cultivation. An advancing industrious race will demand of its stewards and overseers, more and more brainwork, 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 colleges, into broader common sense, into greater attention 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 Jaudati a laudatis. 72. This however is an oblique result, although we may 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 humlred mouth- pieces, of the necessities of drainage, sewerage, omnipresent waj:er pipes for towns ; the permeation of clear streams of water through them at moderate cost ; the formation of parks ; the forbidding of mural dunghills and pigsties; and- the satisfaction of many low needs, without which our highest social aspirations are abortive: even now, I say, Sir Benjamin, you have so indoctrinated 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 criti- cizing ditches, mantled ponds and swampy lowlands ; 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 developed by the Board of Health, as the cleaning consciousness has been evoked by you, the medical pro- fession 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 any body else : they are all wrapped up in long Greek cloaks of technicalities, with black Latin dominoes and visors of prescriptions: it is difficult to judge of them except by kill or cure, WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 41 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 confidence 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. 73. I know they are timid of this, and their eyes but little accus- tomed 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 diffi- cult cases, when 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 any where 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 Homoeopathy 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 (for the mothers will easily have nearly all the routine) ; but 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 function be regretted by vigorous men. when they see that function admirably performed bv fathers and mothers in every house. There is something pusillan- * * OP imous in the wail I often hear from the medical practitioners: "O dear, there is that shocking .Mrs. Dunn who is cutting the ground from under my feet with her abominable little Homoeopathic box." Why, my man, you have no spirit, you are on no ground of your own, or no such person could have interfered with you. Rely 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 without, 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 ill-served and languid wretch yourself, and may well envy any English gentleman who eats, drinks, works, walks and sleeps in the humblest self-dependence. 74. 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 ex- emplifying the case; because, though medicine lies* buried in thick night, war and pestilence lend ghastly torches, to display the want of 6 42 AVAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. public succor, by lifting up for a fold or two, the darkness which shrouds the field of mortality and pain. 7-"). 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 exposed to a drenching rain from sunset to sunrise. The consequence, as T/ir Tinit'a 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 morning, would have been comprised this short direction to each man of the force: TAKE i:in s roxrco- DEXDRON. This is because r/ius has a specific effect in preventing 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 Ho- mrcopathists as the existence of the Bank of England. Rhns does exert such a power. And I tell you that it is a shameful want, of humanity, and of State Economy, not to adopt so simple a means of insuring 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 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 niijht 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 instance No. 1, in which Homoeopathy makes it possible 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 retrfedies 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 efficacious, that they will never fail to save a large percentage of lives; and so inoffensive, that in no case will they enfeeble those who use them. I say, Sir, now, that Homeop- athy 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 continue to omit its name from your reports. By*heaven, Sir Benjamin, for the sake of the hearts of those who are brave and firm for tne in that far land, and for the hearts of wives and families they have left, behind 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. 76. Your medical colleagues will try to laugh me off, and tell you they did not know of r/tns in such a connection. Believe them there: they know of no single feasible way of issuing one instruction bear- WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 43 ing 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 any thing without examining it, if that thing professes to be charged with a message of healing, you must take the consequences of all that is lost by suc,h unhappy obstinacy ; and if the visitant who comes to you in humble guise for the little bread and salt of your best entertainment, happens to be an angel in rags, you have all the guilt of shutting out the angel, though in that moment of your blind- ness 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 ex- tenuation. 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 acting like reasonable beings: you knew that you were condemning before hearing, and it is no excuse that you did not know what vou were condemning. But I will tell you that the angel / against which you slammed your door, had in his open hand, as a present to you from the God of art and science, the health of millions of millions. 77. 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, have each and all been received at first with the contempt 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 hum- ble learning and investigation ? Are statesmen to be always like the dogs and cats, who are the same in the year 1 as in the year 50, re- peating a continual lesson of public shame, and incapable of instruc- tion by experience? Or will they learn at length that unlikelihood and impossibility are two of the chief liveries which the new gifts and dispensations of Providence wear to sightless eyes and unbeliev- ing hearts ? 78. 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 toxicodendron," 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 ; a"^ain her sword hilts in its bloody scabbard, double knighted in that day's fight. I hear the clear approbation of the commander, 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 1 hear nothing which appears to ema- 44 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. rate from the medical stall. Busy sailors, rough as boars in guise, but making their corny, tarry hands like lambs' fleeces for the nonce, arc doing all that penile women can do to remove the maimed creatures to their ships: and assiduous surgeons are in the rear, ex- tracting ."Minie balls, and lopping limbs: but, again, in the name of heaven, who minds us all, \vhat general orders has the medical stall' ive to meet so general and foreseen a disaster of wounds ? " O, 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 li-.-ads, 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 armed, which is by Him commissioned with properties, to heal the wounds inflicted in battle, and to stay many of the sad e fleets of violence upon the life of His quarrelsome children. And had there existed one gentle Bishop of Health in the British Government, eaeh man of that noble arrny would have had this arnica in his knapsack, included in the little case I mentioned before; or perhaps put sttll more handily, in some side pocket near his heart, in order that if he were struck down 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 hurt. After the battle hundreds of men could be served with it in a few minutes, if they were incapable 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 something. 79. But, perhaps, you will tell me that I have torn you to the Cri- mea 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 misfortunes which * Mr. Headland informs me that when the army was starting for the East, he made an offer through a hi as Health Minister, Homoeopathy is your plan and your system, yoiir * The reader will do well to keep the instance of vaccination before him, as of- fering perhaps the solitary specimen in which old physic, instructed here by milk- maids and the common people, has laid firm hold of a HomcDopathic 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 principle 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, ami engen- der laws to insure its being carried out. This is the plain and pressing interest of every state upon earth ; as attested in vaccination, which is the germ of state med- icine. Homoeopathy 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 admis- sion among our statutes, being welcomed there by the already existing vaccination . laws. Allopathy raises no such claim. 68 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. sole chance for healing manifestoes, and that at this present, you have no other. 120. 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 have done your best. Moreover this is parallel to the surgeon's remark in The 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 boors of Fogydom. 121. Did it ever occur to yon, Sir Benjamin, that the principles of science have done great things for us in this particular age ? That one chief difference between what we are, and what we were, as a material estate, lies in the fact that certain principles have been dis- covered, 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, telegraphs, steamships, steam printing, and a hundred other new things, each have their germ in a stroke of genius at some more central power than had be- fore been handled, and which, once grasped, became, by incessant experiment, our servant thenceforth for innumerable 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 pro- portion to its importance. By this means the machinery of power in the hands of this Government, has become enormous : heat, electri- city, mechanical leverage, speed, power over winds and waves, are exercised in the Cyclopean under world 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 stature!* of 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, 8ir Benjamin, is the corresponding 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 dif- ference. Jt 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 simplified modes of treatment communicable in a few words from the heads of departments to their subordinates : it saves no greater numbers than formerly from epidemic 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 com- WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 61) monwealth. 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 pebbles, which have no cohesion. For the proverb increases 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 message to travel by the old coach down to Edinburgh. They are all private incommuni- cating gentlemen together, Sir Benjamin, and can have nothing to do with your Ministry of Health. That wants new principles, unity, cooperation, association ; such as landed us in the Crimea, and such as, medically applied, \vill put us on the shores of a desired and promised land of healthful power. 122, Now Homoeopathy is exactly such a State Mechanism 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 y one fire puts out another's burning. 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 producing a like disease has just been found and proved. It is especially appli- cable to epidemics, in which I include for the nonce the casualties of battle, general rribrbid 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 cure. 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 landing them in speedy convalescence. It is be- loved 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 strength against disease. It dispenses light to the populations, because it has liberal light in itself. It inspires its professors also with a faith and hope that are the very pulses in the arm of skill : and with a delight in healing, 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 electri- city, and with all the new loves and charities of man, and all his strengths, all over the world. 123. 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 different from those of the present Board of Cleanliness, which will be next to Godliness, when it is associated with your own distinctive or Homoeopathic Ministry. At present 70 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. however, your Board of Cleanliness is in a totally false position, co- operating with Allopathy, which dirties as fast as yon clean. You and it are like a bad housemaid, which first scrubs and then litters; then scrubs and litters again. Carry your sewerage pipes a little higher and finer; insert one of them by an hourglass hole into the bottom of the calomel bin, and carry another into the lowest level of the castor oil tank ; and then you will drain away 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 promised some day to be planted in a cleared and 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 arc for the healing of the nations." For every month yon will put, forth leaves of cure. The heat of summer and the ice of winter, the malignant oast 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 oar human nakedness with immunity as it passes through these destruc- tions 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 Homoeop- athy ! 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 homoeopathic chamomilla, and pewking, for which they will give similar ipecacuanha, in the nurse's arms. Then comes the cutting of teeth, for the pains of which enlargement of powers, they will give again chamomilla, and in hot heads, belladonna ; saving convulsions oftentimes, Sir Benja- min, and piloting the small skiff through quiet tarns. Next the in- fantine diseases; aconite and pulsalilla for simple measles; nitx vomica, ipecacuanha and drosera for whooping cough; and belladonna, and mercuriiis for domestic scarlet fever. You will sympathi/e es- pecially 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 allo- pathic dwarfing: you know how hard it has been for yon to grow from the infinitesimal 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 calcarea 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 pvlmlilla, and if the roses of their cheeks are long in coming, occasional suljthur. 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 WAR, CHOLERA, AXD THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 71 general recommendation 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 constitute 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 this constipation from which they are breathless with running, 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 mix romica 12, in a wine glass of water, and to take it night and morning for a fortnight. 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 peo- ple, occasionally in the papers, advertising the benignity of your office ? The Morrisons and Culvenvells 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 sufferers. 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. 124. 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 mariner of your fruits will be especially administered for the eradica- tion of hereditary tendencies and diseases. With the most delicate pipework of the science of your Board, you will proceed to drain those old swamps and miasms 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 morasses termed workhouses, will begin to be won into cultivation and sanitary pro- priety 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 will continue 72 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. for weeks, or months, according to benefit: and afterwards they will do the same with su/p/t/tr 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 teaspoonful to the infants, once or twice a day. You will make many bandy legs straight, Sir Benjamin, many too large heads and stomachs healthily cornpassable, by these in- credibly simple means : you will save many a crooked back : and in after life many a case of consumption. Your success here will greatly increase your practice, for by very deeds you will have got into the hearts of the poor. You will also have disembarrassed the doctors of a new set of domestic cases ; and given them time for their own real part : a vast advantage for medicine proper, as I can tell you. 125. 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 callings 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 requirements of health. One reason of this is, that the great esprit de corps, the fire of industry and commonwealth 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 circumstances 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 equil- ibrates the body with the head, suffers 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 short, you know well the story of the occupations of the people as affecting the national health. Now for these general causes you will hold medical councils, and as your light comes, issue general prescriptions. Imagine the happiness resulting from your triumphs here ! Your antechamber, 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 Muses, come up to London to give a specimen of their strong quality of hearty thanks under the window of the Health Minister. 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 homeopathic power and light has enabled you to confer upon the industrial populations of your country. 126. 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 WAR. CHOLKRA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 73 doctor's life. He stands in the midst of all pains and all apprehen- sions, 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 Pharmacopoeia. This profession upon which you are embarked, is the meeting-place of the health of the body and the soul, " ubi mystici aguntur convent us, et sacra junguntur fa'dera" And stooping and rising, stooping and rising, are the, native undulations of the medical art. Therefore in my singularities of style to you, I have not been untrue to man's hill and vale, to the sublimity and lowliness of my subject. 127. I have indeed tried to batter down much, and if I am not mis- taken, 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 pro- posed something better and happier for physic itself than the old walled towns by which it now menaces Society, but I have also shown 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 per- ceive that I am not cap in hand in your antechamber, and want no place in your councils. I prefer my freedom of voice, as useful to me beyond even the livery of her Most Gracious Majesty; and I reserve it untrammelled for the next, and if need be, for many future occasions. For though I abhor scribbling, and sorrow 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 tram- pled 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 Homoeopathy waves over the Ministry of Health, over the Army and Navy, over Printing House Square, and until its telegraphic signals from the head quarters of your New Palace pass far and wide, with healing on their wings, to every the remotest corner of my beloved country. 128. 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 constitution 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 Homoeopathy 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 Homoeopaths. Old physic will clearly decline all appointments made in this sense, and decline them ungrudgingly; because you are not interfering with any thing it ever 10 74 WAR, CHOLERA, AN 7 D THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. intended to do, or dreamed of as possible, but about to perform func- tions quite new and to it most foreign. It will then jog on its own \vny. Let the appointments therefore be made, and seat around the green baixe table such of the chiefs of the homu-opathic power in London as will heartily cooperate 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 dornestie 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 of Homoeopathy in the House of Commons. Allopaths are, of course, inadmissible, just as single Homoeopaths 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 intel- ligent 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 therefore to the rest. And as they will be family men, they will represent in that im- portant council, the domestic medical wants of the people.* 1:29. I have called you Emperor of the Bills of Mortality, 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 sen- sibly diminished, partly from the active power of your means of cure, and partly that drugging, bleeding, blistering, and calornelizing will have passed away forever, that old age will come to be connected with death once more, the doctors will escape finally from Moliere and the comedians, and the decease of mankind will be due to Nature and to Providence, whose benignity alone can sustain the credit of it In the mean time, as life will be longer, the state will be stronger, and new colonies to lisp your name and imitate your institutions will proceed out of the loins of your Hygeia of Westminster. Sir Benja- min Hall's save-all Homoeopathy, will make a present to the Brit- ish empire of the population of a large capital city every year. Your functions will thus come to be associated exclusively 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. 130. Besides all my other reasons, Sir Benjamin, I see ground for knowing that these great changes are imminent, not only in the pres- ent crisis of war and cholera (which indeed proclaim a summa dies et * One obvious part of medical reform embraces the reconstruction of the office of Coroner, which can only be tilled properly by a Honni'opath, cither lay or med- ical. 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 inquest ought to be considered as valid or transacted without having had the benefit of the testimony of one or more homoeopathic physicians or surgeons. WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 75 ineluctabile tempus for old physic), but also in what I would term a chronic crisis, which has been gradually 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 head work 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 alto- gether too rapid for such rust as this to come into it. None but gen- tlemen of fortune and consummate indolence have a right to these fads. There is an anecdote which I have always found very pro- phetic on this score; of Earl Howe, I think; who feeling himself one day 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 sum- moned on deck, saw likelihood of work, ran straight to the side of the ship, exclaimed, " By God, this'll 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 bedsj the enemy of inaction is in sight; and Neptune is waiting over The Britannia's bulwarks for Old Physic. 131. Your statistical tables of mortality under the new Board, in- stead 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 them will be most precisely instructive. You will find some large items of death almost struck out of your list by Homoeopathy; pneu- monia and fever, whooping cough, measles and scarlatina, will cease to occupy their present gross places, and your relations 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 intractable parts of your statistics ; to dig out the old malignant stumps of disease. Ho- moeopathy will date much of its own progress from your exact regis- trations 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 * This morning I had a confirmation of the truth of this as applicable 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. l - This'll never do," was his wife's thought, so she came to me. told her story, and wound it up by saying (the Italics are her own), " The idea of giving a working man an ounce of salts." This matter of Allopathy, by the by, is a vital thing as connected with finance for Benefit Clubs : they will improve their in- comes, and increase their stability, vastly, by calling in the homoeopaths. 76 WAR, CHOLERA, AND TIIR MINISTRY OF IIKALTH. geniuses roiiio from God, cultivation, which also comes from Him, inakos their generations proceed, and ihoir works universal. And your Ministry of Health will have vast opportunities of expanding and enlarging iho Homoeopathic Powers. On questions of medicines you will avoid one fault, which, like the 1 wolves of hunger and pov- erty, ha< ruthlessly pursued old physic: you will listen to the voice of simple populations of remote places and rural districts, when they tell you of their herbs and their >imples, and of the cures which their "irregular" good old Women and good old men have performed in their houses. \}y this means, like (Slant Antsrus, 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 breathing her native country air among the rustics and village maidens; for you will then find out, that medicine has her birthplace in these unso- phisticated abodes; and that the best things in the proud Pharma- copoeia are nothing but the tangled and matted tops, of which herbs and simples are the root. Think what a dominion of inquiry is here, for a Health Ministry and a British Government, which has lands and gardens and ancient populations under its sway in every climate 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 mem- bers 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 Dios- corides. You will then be on a level with the age, on other great branches recently constituted, and the beautiful lineaments and land- scapes of physical geography will have their humane double, in that which especially pertains in a medical sense, to this swelling Anglo- Saxon life, Oceanic* or Geographical Physic. 132. You will also see now, Sir Benjamin, that there is such a thing as State Medicine, and that it is a most active industrial sum- mit of the healing art, which receives from the art and science of Homoeopathy its specific powers, and gives them, according to the importance of the case to the nation, either the stringency of legisla- tive acts, or else the high patronage and recommendations of the Health Ministry. Vaccination for small pox, and lemon juice for * I borrow this word "oceanic" as a formula from one erf the most remarkable books of our time", Smith's Divine Drama of History and Civilization. To Britain, according to this book, belongs the inauguration of a new providential epoch, which is no longer Judean, Greek, Roman, or French no longer national and mediterranean, but planetary, 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? WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 77 scurvy, are the types of its twin departments. You can hardly fail to have put together in your mind, some of the timbers and rafters of this great institution. State Medicine hitherto has been confounded with Police Medicine, 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 poisoners, where ordi- nary 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. 133. 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 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 perhaps 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 between 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 Homoeop- athy, 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 under world, but privileged at length to present their completed in- dustry to the fruitful daylight powers. It lies at first like a pinch be- tween the apprehensive fingers, for it has a principle, similia similibus curantur, so curt as to occupy but a single cell in our intelligence ; but the principle is a practice also, and no sooner is it wanted, than it opens like a huge airy fanship, and most unlike the cramp-ribbed allopathic luggers, and embraces all needs and departments of heal- ing. Sick armies and navies one after another lie snugly bedded in crews, regiments 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. I think you will acknowledge, Sir Benjamin, that the old Rune Men saw Homoeopathy, together with many other true 78 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. principles and practices, from a kind of mythical Pisgah, when they launched that simple intinitcsimal ship, and undeterred by its first si/r, put Valhalla \viihin its hospitable ribs. They meant for you there a practical lesson, in the convenient minuteness of principles, 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. 134. Speaking of Skidbladnir, "the best of ships," reminds me also of the wolf Fenrir, who was the worst of wolves. Of him it is also written in northern Runes, and as Homoeopathy is prefigured in what 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 foretold 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 diversions ; but they grow in spite of these, and even acquire head and power in overcoming the false chain Lceding or stealth. The body and substance of our enemy being recognized, the second chain with which we would cabin him, is vio- lence, 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 Drbnri, which means our tight squeezing; whereby we force disease into new conquests, and as the people say, drive it in. The fetter effectual, Gleipnir, the gulper of disease, comes out of dwarfland, the under world of the sciences, in fact, Germany, and it is made of impalpables, magnetisms and decillionths, and called Homoeopathy : a dynamical scientific power. The rune book says : " Thou inayest 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 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 79 have said is equally true, (with thy no sight,) though there may be some things that thou art not of might to experience." This signi- fies the impossibility and improbability of Homoeopathy, the noth- ingness 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. 135. And now, quitting stories, Sir Benjamin, I hope that in your old age, (which may God and Homoeopathy long put off and pro- tract,) when this Marylebone has been resigned, and your palace of health is occupied by your successor, you will write a final Bridge- 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 creation! No longer the anatomical muscles and tendons of the hu- man hand, but the living Divine Palmistry itself is your theme. The revelation of God to man, in the great healing power as it wells from. God. You will show that the smallest drops of the life of nature, juices beyond all eyes to see, have each their predestined 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 pal- liate the trembles and pains that seasonably arise out of the stem of our weakness. Yoa will show that poisons are run through with goodness, and that serpents are emblems and processes of eternity in this also, that life for the ailing mainsprings of life lies under their well-appointed fangs.* You will show that water and air are great pharmacopeias, 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 pre- cise; that they pierce the flashing heavens that health may come down. In evidence of all this you 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 grievous 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 creature. If you please, it shall be the last theme that the first Health Minister of this kingdom, as he stands on the great brink, shall re- hearse for our children's children. 136. Yet long before this day comes, you will have the clergy of these realms on the side of Homoeopathy, which has opened to you * Let me give my meed of praise to Dr. Rutherford Russell, for introducing Co- bra poison as a homoeopathic remedy in diseases of the valves of the heart. It is a marvel which will yet tell upon the statistical tables of the Ministry of Health. 80 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. and the nation all this intelligence, 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 dis- senting (lock its minister, who like our .Master, dispenses healing to both the body and the soul. Allopathy laughs at this, as it would at "the elay 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. 137. Minister of Health, and my dear Countrymen, and Country- women, I am done. I have written to you in haste, as it were be- tween bedside and bedside, in the intervals of urgent duties. Impe- rious haste! For Old 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 destruc- tions 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 Homoeopathy in the Leading Jour- nal. 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 yourselves, and force; the tardy Government and the Minis- try of Health to send out efficient succor to bleeding and dying broth- ers 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 succeed- ed through half a century. Recollect, you cannot shift the responsi- bility now to the shoulders of Old Physic : incapable of all action, it cannot carry for you a straw of the burden that leadens your con- science. 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 prac- tices you know too well already. Above all, you must not diploma- ti/e 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 the eve of great battles, and each of them is fought under the horrors of unrelenting diseases. You have oppor- tunity still to save thousands ot lives, and to prevent miseries incal- culable. Contribute open mindedness, courage, and human love, as well as money, to the Patriotic Fund. Answer your Queen by giv- ing two mites ; one, all your soul, the other all your substance. Now is your accepted time, now is your day of salvation. ArrENoix. I am pleased to add the name of the distinguished Dr. Charge, of Marseilles, tn those who make it their iMisiriexs to instruct the laity in medical practice. In the Preface in the Ninth Edition of his Traitrment fjiimaopathiijue Prinerratif ft curatif du Cholera t'.pidemiyue. Instruction populaire, pouvant srrvir df Gitide. en I'abienee du M -limn. Marseille, 185-1 ; he says, "J'ecris, cette foin, pour le malades et arm de leur etre \ raiment utile, jo dirai ce iju'il cst e.sseiitirl de connaitre." At p. fi, "'/"out le mantle, sans lire me- drrin, prut et doit gitrrir le chulfra, grace* d V Hnmaopalhie. . . . I)e.<< 1849 j'esperai le plus grand hicn de cette Jn*trurliun Pnputaire ; aiijourd'hui fort dc tciimi^M.-iL'i-s nnmbreiix, j'affirme que, par le secours seul de ce travail, leu gtns dn moiiilt ont pufri un Ires-grand nombre de cholfriquf,i. . . . Otte affirmation n'est autre eho-e que 1'exprension affaiblie de la plus stricte verite, et pourtant e'