th more
Homoeopathic practitioners than there are students attending Lectures at
the Massachusetts Medical College at the present time. In America it has
undoubtedly proved more popular and lucrative, yet how loose a hold it
has on the public confidence is shown by the fact that, when a specially
valued life, which has been played with by one of its agents, is
seriously threatened, the first thing we expect to hear is that a
regular practitioner is by the patient's bed, and the Homoeopathic
counsellor overruled or discarded. Again, how many of the ardent and
capricious persons who embraced Homoeopathy have run the whole round of
pretentious novelties;--have been boarded at water-cure establishments,
closeted with uterine and other specialists, and finally wandered over
seas to put themselves in charge of foreign celebrities, who dosed them
as lustily as they were ever dosed before they took to globules! It
will surprise many to learn to what a shadow of a shade Homoeopathy
has dwindled in the hands of many of its noted practitioners. The
itch-doctrine is treated with contempt. Infinitesimal doses are replaced
by full ones whenever the fancy-practitioner chooses. Good Homoeopathic
reasons can be found for employing anything that anybody wants to
employ. Homoeopathy is now merely a name, an unproved theory, and a box
of pellets pretending to be specifics, which, as all of us know, fail
ignominiously in those cases where we would thankfully sacrifice all our
prejudices and give the world to have them true to their promises.

Homoeopathy has not died out so rapidly as Tractoration. Perhaps it was
well that it should not, for it has taught us a lesson of the healing
faculty of Nature which was needed, and for which many of us have made
proper acknowledgments. But it probably does more harm than good to
medical science at the present time, by keeping up the delusion of
treating everything by specifics,--the old barbarous notion that sick
people should feed on poisons [Lachesis, arrow-poison, obtained from a
serpent (Pulte). Crotalus horridus, rattlesnake's venom (Neidhard). The
less dangerous Pediculus capitis is the favorite remedy of Dr. Mure, the
English "Apostle of Homoeopathy." These are examples of the retrograde
current setting towards barbarism] against which a part of the Discourse
at the beginning of this volume is directed.

The infinitesimal globules have not become a curiosity as yet, like
Perkins's Tractors. Bu