ering all the circumstances surrounding the patient (as
can be done everywhere out of the crowded pauper districts), than are
taken now by too many who think they do their duty and earn their money
when they write a recipe for a patient left in an atmosphere of domestic
malaria, or to the most negligent kind of nursing! I confess that I
should think my chance of recovery from illness less with Hippocrates
for my physician and Mrs. Gamp for my nurse, than if I were in the hands
of Hahnemann himself, with Florence Nightingale or good Rebecca Taylor
to care for me.

If I am right in maintaining that the presumption is always against
the use of noxious agents in disease, and if any whom I might influence
should adopt this as a principle of practice, they will often find
themselves embarrassed by the imperative demand of patients and their
friends for such agents where a case is not made out against this
standing presumption. I must be permitted to say, that I think the
French, a not wholly uncivilized people, are in advance of the English
and ourselves in the art of prescribing for the sick without hurting
them. And I do confess that I think their varied ptisans and syrups are
as much preferable to the mineral regimen of bug-poison and ratsbane,
so long in favor on the other side of the Channel, as their art of
preparing food for the table to the rude cookery of those hard-feeding
and much-dosing islanders. We want a reorganized cuisine of invalidism
perhaps as much as the culinary, reform, for which our lyceum lecturers,
and others who live much at hotels and taverns, are so urgent. Will you
think I am disrespectful if I ask whether, even in Massachusetts, a dose
of calomel is not sometimes given by a physician on the same principle
as that upon which a landlord occasionally prescribes bacon and
eggs,--because he cannot think of anything else quite so handy? I leave
my suggestion of borrowing a hint from French practice to your mature
consideration.

I may, however, call your attention, briefly, to the singular fact,
that English and American practitioners are apt to accuse French medical
practice of inertness, and French surgical practice of unnecessary
activity. Thus, Dr. Bostock considers French medical treatment, with
certain exceptions, as "decidedly less effective" than that of his own
country. Mr. S. Cooper, again, defends the simple British practice of
procuring union by the first intention against the attacks of