unce our
movement are themselves caught in various eddies that set back against
the truth. And we do most earnestly desire and most actively strive,
that Medicine, which, it is painful to remember, has been spoken of
as "the withered branch of science" at a meeting of the British
Association, shall be at length brought fully to share, if not to lead,
the great wave of knowledge which rolls with the tides that circle the
globe.

If there is any State or city which might claim to be the American
headquarters of the nature-trusting heresy, provided it be one, that
State is Massachusetts, and that city is its capital. The effect which
these doctrines have upon the confidence reposed in the profession is a
matter of opinion. For myself, I do not believe this confidence can be
impaired by any investigations which tend to limit the application of
troublesome, painful, uncertain, or dangerous remedies. Nay, I will
venture to say this, that if every specific were to fail utterly, if the
cinchona trees all died out, and the arsenic mines were exhausted, and
the sulphur regions were burned up, if every drug from the vegetable,
animal, and mineral kingdom were to disappear from the market, a body of
enlightened men, organized as a distinct profession, would be required
just as much as now, and respected and trusted as now, whose province
should be to guard against the causes of disease, to eliminate them if
possible when still present, to order all the conditions of the patient
so as to favor the efforts of the system to right itself, and to give
those predictions of the course of disease which only experience can
warrant, and which in so many cases relieve the exaggerated fears of
sufferers and their friends, or warn them in season of impending danger.
Great as the loss would be if certain active remedies could no longer be
obtained, it would leave the medical profession the most essential part
of it's duties, and all, and more than all, its present share of honors;
for it would be the death-blow to charlatanism, which depends for its
success almost entirely on drugs, or at least on a nomenclature that
suggests them.

There is no offence, then, or danger in expressing the opinion, that,
after all which has been said, the community is still overdosed: The
best proof of it is, that "no families take so little medicine as those
of doctors, except those of apothecaries, and that old practitioners are
more sparing of active medicines