has been--not inaptly styled--"The daughter of dreams." From
the time of Hippocrates until now, the great body of the profession
has been swayed by conflicting theories, founded upon either the
wholly unsupported fancies and conjectures of their authors, or
unwarrantably built upon isolated facts, often accidental in their
occurence, partial in their observation, and improperly understood in
their inherent nature and theoretical significance, pointing to a law
of action widely different from the one in support of which they had
been adduced. All branches of medicine have been involved in these
crude absurdities; nor has the nomenclature of any department of
science, even in our day, been entirely purged from the errors and
misleadings with which the past so fruitfully abounds.

To mark the improvement and advancement in the various branches of
medical science; to compare the present with the past; to observe the
unfolding growth, maturity, and decay of medical creeds; to discern
the power of those master-minds, that, far beyond the ages in which
they lived fore-shadowed the forth-coming discoveries that were to
make other men immortal; to sigh over the incredulity of whole races,
whose blind and dogmatical adherence to the theories of some prominent
physiologist or anatomist--was at once silenced by the light of a new
truth, suddenly and clearly promulgated by a single mind. To do all
these things, was the labor of a whole life; volumes could be written
in such investigation, and still thousands of facts be left untouched
and forgotten, forever buried in the chaos of medical creeds, medical
truths and medical fictions.

Old Physic has for several centuries past drifted in the wrong
direction, striking occasionally upon a rock, but finds itself to day
further off from shore than ever before.

Medicine, the oldest and most important of all branches of science,
has not kept up with developments in other departments, but the rays
of light have already deeply penetrated into the darkness of the past,
fast undermining the building of the so-called "Rational Medicine"
with all its hypothesis and traditions.

* * * * *

It was near the end of the last century, that the idea occurred to a
single man, that the reason he had failed in practice must be that the
medical profession was entirely on the wrong path. He made the effort
to cure diseases on the principle directly opposite to those on wh