eves that he is on
the verge of a great discovery, in which Virginia Snake Root will be
an ingredient, heaven knows why! Virginia Snake Root fascinates
the imagination of the herbalist as mercury used to fascinate the
alchemists. On week days he keeps a shop in which he sells packets of
pennyroyal, dandelion, etc., labelled with little lists of the diseases
they are supposed to cure, and apparently do cure to the satisfaction of
the people who keep on buying them. I have never been able to perceive
any distinction between the science of the herbalist and that of the
duly registered doctor. A relative of mine recently consulted a doctor
about some of the ordinary symptoms which indicate the need for a
holiday and a change. The doctor satisfied himself that the patient's
heart was a little depressed. Digitalis being a drug labelled as a
heart specific by the profession, he promptly administered a stiff dose.
Fortunately the patient was a hardy old lady who was not easily killed.
She recovered with no worse result than her conversion to Christian
Science, which owes its vogue quite as much to public despair of doctors
as to superstition. I am not, observe, here concerned with the question
as to whether the dose of digitalis was judicious or not; the point is,
that a farm laborer consulting a herbalist would have been treated in
exactly the same way.

BACTERIOLOGY AS A SUPERSTITION

The smattering of science that all--even doctors--pick up from the
ordinary newspapers nowadays only makes the doctor more dangerous than
he used to be. Wise men used to take care to consult doctors qualified
before 1860, who were usually contemptuous of or indifferent to the germ
theory and bacteriological therapeutics; but now that these veterans
have mostly retired or died, we are left in the hands of the generations
which, having heard of microbes much as St. Thomas Aquinas heard of
angels, suddenly concluded that the whole art of healing could be summed
up in the formula: Find the microbe and kill it. And even that they did
not know how to do. The simplest way to kill most microbes is to throw
them into an open street or river and let the sun shine on them, which
explains the fact that when great cities have recklessly thrown all
their sewage into the open river the water has sometimes been cleaner
twenty miles below the city than thirty miles above it. But doctors
instinctively avoid all facts that are reassuring, and eagerly swallo