onditions in the patients treated, and hardly even then. Of course,
then, a Russian Admiral, by the name of Mordvinov, backed by a number
of so-called physicians practising in Russian villages, is singularly
competent to the task of settling the whole question of the utility of
this or that kind of treatment; to prove that, if not more than eight
and a half per cent. of those attacked with the disease perished, the
rest owed their immunity to Hahnemann. I can remember when more than
a hundred patients in a public institution were attacked with what, I
doubt not, many Homoeopathic physicians (to say nothing of Homoeopathic
admirals) would have called cholera, and not one of them died, though
treated in the common way, and it is my firm belief that, if such a
result had followed the administration of the omnipotent globules, it
would have been in the mouth of every adept in Europe, from Quin of
London to Spohr of Gandersheim. No longer ago than yesterday, in one of
the most widely circulated papers of this city, there was published an
assertion that the mortality in several Homoeopathic Hospitals was
not quite five in a hundred, whereas, in what are called by the writer
Allopathic Hospitals, it is said to be eleven in a hundred. An honest
man should be ashamed of such an argumentum ad ignorantiam. The
mortality of a hospital depends not merely on the treatment of the
patients, but on the class of diseases it is in the habit of receiving,
on the place where it is, on the season, and many other circumstances.
For instance, there are many hospitals in the great cities of Europe
that receive few diseases of a nature to endanger life, and, on the
other hand, there are others where dangerous diseases are accumulated
out of the common proportion. Thus, in the wards of Louis, at the
Hospital of La Pitie, a vast number of patients in the last stages of
consumption were constantly entering, to swell the mortality of that
hospital. It was because he was known to pay particular attention to
the diseases of the chest that patients laboring under those fatal
affections to an incurable extent were so constantly coming in upon him.
It is always a miserable appeal to the thoughtlessness of the vulgar, to
allege the naked fact of the less comparative mortality in the practice
of one hospital or of one physician than another, as an evidence of the
superiority of their treatment. Other things being equal, it must always
be expected that those