has unquestionably helped
to teach wise people that nature heals most diseases without help from
pharmaceutic art, but it continues to persuade fools that art can arrest
them all with its specifics.

It is worse than useless to attempt in any way to check the freest
expression of opinion as to the efficacy of any or all of the "heroic"
means of treatment employed by practitioners of different schools and
periods. Medical experience is a great thing, but we must not forget
that there is a higher experience, which tries its results in a court
of a still larger jurisdiction; that, namely, in which the laws of human
belief are summoned to the witness-box, and obliged to testify to the
sources of error which beset the medical practitioner. The verdict is as
old as the father of medicine, who announces it in the words, "judgment
is difficult." Physicians differed so in his time, that some denied that
there was any such thing as an art of medicine.

One man's best remedies were held as mischievous by another. The art of
healing was like soothsaying, so the common people said; "the same bird
was lucky or unlucky, according as he flew to the right or left."

The practice of medicine has undergone great changes within the period
of my own observation. Venesection, for instance, has so far gone out
of fashion, that, as I am told by residents of the New York Bellevue
and the Massachusetts General Hospitals, it is almost obsolete in
these institutions, at least in medical practice. The old Brunonian
stimulating treatment has come into vogue again in the practice of Dr.
Todd and his followers. The compounds of mercury have yielded their
place as drugs of all work, and specifics for that very frequent
subjective complaint, nescio quid faciam,--to compounds of iodine. [Sir
Astley Cooper has the boldness,--or honesty,--to speak of medicines
which "are given as much to assist the medical man as his patient."
Lectures (London, 1832), p. 14.] Opium is believed in, and quinine,
and "rum," using that expressive monosyllable to mean all alcoholic
cordials. If Moliere were writing now, instead of saignare, purgare,
and the other, he would be more like to say, Stimulare, opium dare et
potassio-iodizare.

I have been in relation successively with the English and American
evacuant and alterative practice, in which calomel and antimony figured
so largely that, as you may see in Dr. Jackson's last "Letter," Dr.
Holyoke, a good representative o