ich
he had been educated to act, and he was successful. He thought a
reformation of medicine needful and desirable, and proper to be
attempted. He set about it, hoping, if he should succeed in pointing
out a more safe, certain and pleasant road to the life-giving and
life-renewing fountain of health, that it would be a blessing to
suffering humanity. That man was

SAMUEL HAHNEMANN.

Had the reform inaugurated by him been of an insignificant character,
it might have been accepted by the medical world without controversy.
Had the new path into which he invited the profession been only a
little smoother than the old one and lying right alongside of it, like
that which led the pilgrims from the main high-way into the domains
of the giant, physicians might have been easily lured into it. But the
revolution was a radical one. It contemplated a counter-march such as
the teachers and practitoners of the healing art had never been called
upon to make. It called upon the chiefs of the profession to reverse
the wheels of the ponderous engine, and seek for the long-sought shore
in the opposite direction.

The new doctrine came forth embodied in only three simple words:
"_Similia Similibus Curantur_."

Thus the year 1790 gave birth to the celebrated system of Hahnemann,
which has received from him a Greek title, expressive of its
peculiarities--Hom[oe]opathy, and in opposition to "_Contraria
Contraries Curantur_."--Allopathy.

It is not my purpose to entertain you with a detailed history of
medicine, nor even to notice the successive and conflicting theories
that have arisen from time to time; but simply to show that the
old, or Allopathic system of medicine as practiced till this day
is unworthy of our confidence; that its theory of therapeutics is
irrational and worthless; that there is an absence of any reliable
principle to guide the physicians in the treatment of diseases;
and that the sick are far better off when left to nature, than when
subject to the pernicious system of dosing, while a growing want of
confidence in this system, both in the public mind and the medical
profession, loudly calls for something more rational in its theory and
more successful in its practice.

I shall not ask you to accept my individual opinions in support of
these views, but shall place upon the witness-stand, and give you the
declarations of men who have spent their lives in the practice of this
system--most of them authors and teach