reporter, Servan no longer sees before him but one class of adversaries,
regent doctors of the Faculty of Paris, and then he gives full scope to
his satirical vein. He holds it even as an honour that they do not
regard him as impartial. "The doctors have killed me; what it has
pleased them to leave me of life is not worth, in truth, my seeking a
milder term.... For these twenty years I have always been worse through
the remedies administered to me than through my maladies.... Even were
animal magnetism a chimera, it should be tolerated; it would still be
useful to mankind, by saving many individuals among them from the
incontestable dangers of vulgar medicine.... I wish that medicine, so
long accustomed to deceive itself, should still deceive itself now, and
that the famous report be nothing but a great error...." Amidst these
singular declarations, there are hundreds of epigrams still more
remarkable by their ingenious and lively turn than by their novelty. If
it were true, Gentlemen, that the medical corps had ever tried,
knowingly, to impose on the vulgar, to hide the uncertainty of their
knowledge, the weakness of their theories, the vagueness of their
conceptions, under an obscure and pedantic jargon, the immortal and
laughable sarcasms of Moliere would not have been more than an act of
strict justice. In all cases every thing has its day; now, towards the
end of the eighteenth century, the most delicate, the most thorny points
of doctrine were discussed with an entire good faith, with perfect
lucidity, and in a style that placed many members of the faculty in the
rank Of our best speakers. Servan, however, goes beyond the limits of a
scientific discussion, when, without any sort of excuse, he accuses his
adversaries of being anti-mesmerists through esprit de corps, and, what
is worse, through cupidity.

Servan is more in his element when he points out that the present best
established medical theories occasioned at their birth prolonged
debates; when he reminds us that several medicines have been alternately
proscribed and recommended with vehemence: the author might even have
more deeply undermined this side of his subject. Instead of some
unmeaning jokes, why did he not show us, for example, in a neighbouring
country, two celebrated physicians, Mead and Woodward, deciding, sword
in hand, the quarrel that had arisen between them as to the purgative
treatment of a patient? We should then have heard Woodward, pier