ers, men living in different
countries, and from the highest ranks of the profession, and who,
if any, should be able to pronounce a eulogy upon this system of
practice.

I introduce to you first BOERHAVE, a man justly illustrious in the
history of medicine, he lived a century before HAHNEMANN, and was for
over forty years Professor at the University at Leiden.

Hear him! He says:

"If we compare the good which a half dozen true disciples
of Aesculapius have done since their art began, with the
evil which the immense number of doctors have inflicted
upon mankind, we must be satisfied that it would have been
infinitely better for mankind if medical men had never
existed."

The celebrated BICHAT of Paris, thus speaks of the therapeutic system
of his day:

"It is an incoherent assemblage of incoherent opinions; it
is perhaps, of all the physiological sciences that which best
shows the caprice of the human mind. What do I say?--It is not
a science for a methodical mind; it is a shapeless assemblage
of inexact ideas, of observations often peurile, of deceptive
remedies and of formula as fastidiously and fantastically
conceived, as they are tediously arranged."

Then we find the equally celebrated French physician, MAJENDIE,
saying:

"I hesitate not to declare, no matter how sorely I shall
wound our vanity, that so gross is our ignorance of the
physiological disorders called diseases, that it would perhaps
be better to do nothing, and resign the complaint we are
called upon to treat to the resources of Nature, than to act
as we frequently do, without knowing the why and the wherefore
of our conduct, and at the obvious risk of hastening the end
of our patient."

DR. GOOD, the great nosologist, asserts that

"The science of medicine is a barbarous jargon, and the
effects of our medicines on the human system are in the
highest degree uncertain; except, indeed, that they have
already destroyed more lives than war, pestilence and famine
combined."

SIR ASTLEY COOPER, England's greatest surgeon says:

"The science of medicine is founded on conjecture and improved
by murder."

But, it may be said, these men lived in the past, and since their time
the science of medicine has improved and its practice has become more
rational and safe.

* * * * *

Let us then come down to