ken in ordinary perceptible quantities, will,
when taken in infinitesimally small quantities, provoke just the
opposite symptoms; so that the drug that gives you a headache will
also cure a headache if you take little enough of it. I have already
explained that the savage opposition which homeopathy encountered from
the medical profession was not a scientific opposition; for nobody seems
to deny that some drugs act in the alleged manner. It was opposed simply
because doctors and apothecaries lived by selling bottles and boxes of
doctor's stuff to be taken in spoonfuls or in pellets as large as peas;
and people would not pay as much for drops and globules no bigger than
pins' heads. Nowadays, however, the more cultivated folk are beginning
to be so suspicious of drugs, and the incorrigibly superstitious people
so profusely supplied with patent medicines (the medical advice to take
them being wrapped round the bottle and thrown in for nothing) that
homeopathy has become a way of rehabilitating the trade of prescription
compounding, and is consequently coming into professional credit. At
which point the theory of opsonins comes very opportunely to shake hands
with it.

Add to the newly triumphant homeopathist and the opsonist that other
remarkable innovator, the Swedish masseur, who does not theorize about
you, but probes you all over with his powerful thumbs until he finds out
your sore spots and rubs them away, besides cheating you into a little
wholesome exercise; and you have nearly everything in medical practice
to-day that is not flat witchcraft or pure commercial exploitation of
human credulity and fear of death. Add to them a good deal of vegetarian
and teetotal controversy raging round a clamor for scientific eating
and drinking, and resulting in little so far except calling digestion
Metabolism and dividing the public between the eminent doctor who tells
us that we do not eat enough fish, and his equally eminent colleague
who warns us that a fish diet must end in leprosy, and you have all that
opposes with any sort of countenance the rise of Christian Science with
its cathedrals and congregations and zealots and miracles and cures:
all very silly, no doubt, but sane and sensible, poetic and hopeful,
compared to the pseudo science of the commercial general practitioner,
who foolishly clamors for the prosecution and even the execution of the
Christian Scientists when their patients die, forgetting the long death
ro