the interruption of that, and a greater
derangement of the system, by conjectural experiments on a machine so
complicated and so unknown as the human body, and a subject so sacred
as human life. Or, if the appearance of doing something be necessary to
keep alive the hope and spirits of the patient, it should be of the most
innocent character. One of the most successful physicians I have ever
known, has assured me, that he used more bread pills, drops of colored
water, and powders of hickory ashes, than of all other medicines put
together. It was certainly a pious fraud. But the adventurous physician
goes on, and substitutes presumption for knowledge. From the scanty
field of what is known, he launches into the boundless region of what
is unknown. He establishes for his guide some fanciful theory of
corpuscular attraction, of chemical agency, of mechanical powers, of
stimuli, of irritability accumulated or exhausted, of depletion by the
lancet, and repletion by mercury, or some other ingenious dream, which
lets him into all nature's secrets at short hand. On the principle which
he thus assumes, he forms his table of nosology, arrays his diseases
into families, and extends his curative treatment, by analogy, to all
the cases he has thus arbitrarily marshaled together. I have lived
myself to see the disciples of Hoffman, Boerhaave, Stahl, Cullen, Brown,
succeed one another like the shifting figures of a magic-lanthern, and
their fancies like the dresses of the annual doll-babies from Paris,
becoming, from their novelty, the vogue of the day, and yielding to
the next novelty their ephemeral favor. The patient, treated on the
fashionable theory, sometimes gets well in spite of the medicine. The
medicine therefore restored him, and the young doctor receives new
courage to proceed in his bold experiments on the lives of his fellow
creatures. I believe we may safely affirm, that the inexperienced and
presumptuous band of medical tyros let loose upon the world, destroys
more of human life in one year, than all the Robin-hoods, Cartouches,
and Macheaths do in a century. It is in this part of medicine that I
wish to see a reform, an abandonment of hypothesis for sober facts, the
first degree of value set on clinical observation, and the lowest on
visionary theories. I would wish the young practitioner, especially, to
have deeply impressed on his mind the real limits of his art, and that
when the state of his patient gets beyond the