the fallacies of medical evidence. Let me state
a case in illustration. Nobody doubts that some patients recover under
every form of practice. Probably all are willing to allow that a
large majority, for instance, ninety in a hundred, of such cases as
a physician is called to in daily practice, would recover, sooner or
later, with more or less difficulty, provided nothing were done to
interfere seriously with the efforts of nature.

Suppose, then, a physician who has a hundred patients prescribes to
each of them pills made of some entirely inert substance, as starch,
for instance. Ninety of them get well, or if he chooses to use such
language, he cures ninety of them. It is evident, according to the
doctrine of chances, that there must be a considerable number of
coincidences between the relief of the patient and the administration
of the remedy. It is altogether probable that there will happen two or
three very striking coincidences out of the whole ninety cases, in which
it would seem evident that the medicine produced the relief, though
it had, as we assumed, nothing to do with it. Now suppose that the
physician publishes these cases, will they not have a plausible
appearance of proving that which, as we granted at the outset, was
entirely false? Suppose that instead of pills of starch he employs
microscopic sugarplums, with the five' million billion trillionth
part of a suspicion of aconite or pulsatilla, and then publishes his
successful cases, through the leaden lips of the press, or the living
ones of his female acquaintances,--does that make the impression a less
erroneous one? But so it is that in Homoeopathic works and journals and
gossip one can never, or next to never, find anything but successful
cases, which might do very well as a proof of superior skill, did it not
prove as much for the swindling advertisers whose certificates disgrace
so many of our newspapers. How long will it take mankind to learn that
while they listen to "the speaking hundreds and units," who make the
world ring with the pretended triumphs they have witnessed, the "dumb
millions" of deluded and injured victims are paying the daily forfeit of
their misplaced confidence!

I am sorry to see, also, that a degree of ignorance as to the natural
course of diseases is often shown in these published cases, which,
although it may not be detected by the unprofessional reader, conveys an
unpleasant impression to those who are acquainted with t