s of this sort, not only in medicine, but in
diet, etcetera.

What medical men would have thought of prescribing fat bacon for
delicate stomachs twenty years ago? Now it is all the vogue; breakfast
bacon sold in every quarter of the metropolis. Either this is quackery,
to use their own term, or twenty years ago they were very ignorant, for
their patients received positive injunctions to avoid all fat and greasy
substances.

Thus do the regular practitioners chop and change about, groping in the
dark: but the only distinction is, that all changes made by the faculty
are orthodox; but any alteration proposed out of the pale of MD, is an
innovation and a quackery.

That we have every where ignorant men, who are _de facto_ quacks, I
admit; but still that term has been as liberally applied to the attempts
of scientific and clever persons to improve the art of medicine. Even
homoeopathy must not be totally rejected until it has had a fair trial.
It has one merit in it, at all events, that you take less physic.

I consider the continual appearance of new quacks on the horizon a sure
proof of the low state of our medical knowledge. The more so as these
quacks, although they kill, do effect very remarkable cures. Do not
regular practitioners kill also? or rather, do not their prescriptions
fail? If a quack cures, they will tell you that it was by mere
accident. I suspect that there is more of accident in the practice than
the faculty are ready to admit; and Heaven knows they so change about
themselves, that it is clear that they feel no confidence in the little
that they do know; and it is because medicine is so imperfect that every
half century we have a new quack, as he is termed, rising up, and
beating the regular practitioners out of the field. I could tell a
story about Morrison's pills which would surprise not a little, and all
the parties are now alive to prove it; but instead of that, I will tell
another which occurred in France, in which a quack medicine had a most
wonderful and unusual effect, for it was the means of the _total
destruction of a Banditti_, who had defied the Government of the country
for many years. About twenty years ago,--I am not sure whether he still
lives,--there was an irregular practitioner in France of the name of Le
Roi. He was, by all accounts, the King of all Empirics, and the Emperor
of all Quacks. He was more potent than the sovereign, and the _par
l'ordre du Roi_ of Governme