wo drinks a day you will
live to be two hundred years old." "I have known a man who had not a
single tooth, and yet he could play a bass drum better than any man I
ever knew;" but do not infer that the pulling of sound teeth will aid in
bringing out all the possibilities of harmony, melody, and delicacy of
tone of this particular instrument of song without words. I have seen a
man seemingly in perfect health at one hundred years old who had eaten
three meals a day; but may I infer that on four meals a day he would
have lived to be one hundred and thirty-three and a third years old? A
hundred times I have been told by physicians that they have had the best
results from certain drugs; but in not one instance was any reason for
their faith advanced.

If I am to be governed by impressions as to the utility of what I may do
for the sick, what is more impressive than to draw blood as they of old
did, with recovery in most cases? Have we reduced the mortality of
disease by a change in dosage? If so, how much, apart from the better
sanitary conditions of living and from those involved in the care of the
sick?

I can easily see or believe there is utility in clearing the digestive
tract at an early date in the case of severe sickness; I know that
stomach and bowels are as machines run by brain power; but beyond this
the materia medica is summed up in this way, "I dose my sick: they get
well: therefore my treatment is successful; or if they die, it is the
providence of God"--and with no thought that it may have been the
providence of bad treatment.

Men and brethren of the medical profession, you believe me a heretic in
all my professional modes, and only endure me because I do not carry
violent hands; but you would bar the sick-room from the bleeder of old.
I may attack the lancet, the herbs, the ground-roots, whose doses were
only as kindling-wood and sawdust a little more refined, and you will
say "Amen" with emphasis. "But we, we live in a more enlightened age:
our doses are more refined"--yes, but you administer them with the same
force of conviction as to their utility in the cure of disease, and with
little thought as to just why they are given and how they act.

It is my present conception that feeding the sick as now very generally
practised will be held, in a more enlightened age, as we now hold the
lancet of a darker age--a twin relic of barbarism; and there will be
only wonder that attempts were ever made to conve