al discussion; viz., that he who had given his tens of pounds of
calomel to his patients, and taken from their arms his hogsheads of
blood, had been on the whole about as successful a practitioner as he
who had revolted from the very thought of both, and had adopted some of
the various forms of the stimulating rather than the depleting system.

"Is there, then, no choice between medication and no-medication? For if
so, what necessity is there of the medical profession? Why not
annihilate it at once?"

My reply is,--and it would have been about the same when these
discoveries began to be made,--that there is no occasion to give up the
whole thing because it has been so sadly abused. Every mode of medical
practice, not to say every medical practitioner from the very beginning,
has been, of necessity, more or less empirical. The whole subject has
been involved in so much ignorance and uncertainty, that even our wisest
practitioners have been liable to err. They have been led, unawares, to
prescribe quite too much for names rather than for symptoms; and their
patients were often glad to have it so. And were the whole matter to
come to an end this day, it might well be questioned whether the
profession, as a whole, has been productive of more good than evil to
mankind. But then, every thing must have its infancy before it can come
to manhood. And it is a consolation to believe that the duration of that
manhood always bears some degree of proportion to the time required in
advancing from infancy to maturity.

Medicine, then, as a science, is valuable in prospect. And then, too, it
is worth something to have a set of men among us on whom we may fasten
our faith; for, credulous as everybody is and will be in this matter of
health and disease, till they can duly be taught the laws of hygiene,
they will lean upon somebody; it is certainly desirable that they should
rely on those whom they know, rather than upon strangers, charlatans,
and conjurors, of whom they know almost nothing.

But I shall have frequent occasion to revert to this subject in other
chapters, and must therefore dismiss it for the present, in order to
make room for other facts, anecdotes, and reflections.

FOOTNOTES:

[B] Of the hydropathist at that time I had not heard.

CHAPTER XVII.

STRUCK WITH DEATH.

Throughout the region where I was brought up, and perhaps throughout the
civilized world, the notion has long prevailed that in some of the