that they were honest and faithful, appealing
to repeated experiments in public, with every precaution to guard
against error, and with the most plain and peremptory results, should
induce us to lend any credence to such pretensions.

The third doctrine, that Psora, the other name of which you remember, is
the cause of the great majority of chronic diseases, is a startling
one, to say the least. That an affection always recognized as a
very unpleasant personal companion, but generally regarded as a
mere temporary incommodity, readily yielding to treatment in those
unfortunate enough to suffer from it, and hardly known among the
better classes of society, should be all at once found out by a German
physician to be the great scourge of mankind, the cause of their
severest bodily and mental calamities, cancer and consumption, idiocy
and madness, must excite our unqualified surprise. And when the
originator of this singular truth ascribes, as in the page now open
before me, the declining health of a disgraced courtier, the chronic
malady of a bereaved mother, even the melancholy of the love-sick
and slighted maiden, to nothing more nor less than the insignificant,
unseemly, and almost unmentionable ITCH, does it not seem as if the
very soil upon which we stand were dissolving into chaos, over the
earthquake-heaving of discovery?

And when one man claims to have established these three independent
truths, which are about as remote from each other as the discovery
of the law of gravitation, the invention of printing, and that of the
mariner's compass, unless the facts in their favor are overwhelming
and unanimous, the question naturally arises, Is not this man deceiving
himself, or trying to deceive others?

I proceed to examine the proofs of the leading ideas of Hahnemann and
his school.

In order to show the axiom, similia similibus curantur (or like is cured
by like), to be the basis of the healing art,--"the sole law of nature
in therapeutics,"--it is necessary,

1. That the symptoms produced by drugs in healthy persons should be
faithfully studied and recorded.

2. That drugs should be shown to be always capable of curing those
diseases most like their own symptoms.

3. That remedies should be shown not to cure diseases when they do not
produce symptoms resembling those presented in these diseases.

1. The effects of drugs upon healthy persons have been studied by
Hahnemann and his associates. Their results we