re made known in his
Materia Medica, a work in three large volumes in the French translation,
published about eight years ago. The mode of experimentation appears to
have been, to take the substance on trial, either in common or minute
doses, and then to set down every little sensation, every little
movement of mind or body, which occurred within many succeeding hours
or days, as being produced solely by the substance employed. When I have
enumerated some of the symptoms attributed to the power of the drugs
taken, you will be able to judge how much value is to be ascribed to the
assertions of such observers.

The following list was taken literally from the Materia Medica of
Hahnemann, by my friend M. Vernois, for whose accuracy I am willing
to be responsible. He has given seven pages of these symptoms, not
selected, but taken at hazard from the French translation of the work. I
shall be very brief in my citations.

"After stooping some time, sense of painful weight about the head upon
resuming the erect posture."

"An itching, tickling sensation at the outer edge of the palm of the
left hand, which obliges the person to scratch." The medicine was
acetate of lime, and as the action of the globule taken is said to last
twenty-eight days, you may judge how many such symptoms as the last
might be supposed to happen.

Among the symptoms attributed to muriatic acid are these: a catarrh,
sighing, pimples; "after having written a long time with the back a
little bent over, violent pain in the back and shoulder-blades, as
if from a strain,"--"dreams which are not remembered,--disposition to
mental dejection,--wakefulness before and after midnight."

I might extend this catalogue almost indefinitely. I have not cited
these specimens with any view to exciting a sense of the ridiculous,
which many others of those mentioned would not fail to do, but to show
that the common accidents of sensation, the little bodily inconveniences
to which all of us are subject, are seriously and systematically
ascribed to whatever medicine may have been exhibited, even in the
minute doses I have mentioned, whole days or weeks previously.

To these are added all the symptoms ever said by anybody, whether
deserving confidence or not, as I shall hereafter illustrate, to be
produced by the substance in question.

The effects of sixty-four medicinal substances, ascertained by one
or both of these methods, are enumerated in the Materia Medica
of H