on of medical knowledge. The
boasted, though groundless pretensions of certain illiterate empirics to
cure diseases which have eluded the skill and penetration of the
faculty, is another absurdity into which people of good common sense
have been most woefully entrapped. The lessons of experience ought to
prove the most useful, as purchased at the greatest trouble and expense;
but if people choose to run over a precipice with their eyes open, they
leave themselves nothing to regret, and the public less to lament, by
their fall.

It was justly observed by the sagacious and intelligent Bacon, "that a
reflecting physician is not directed by the opinion which the multitude
entertain of a favourite remedy, but that be must be guided by a sound
judgment; and consequently, he is led to make very important
distinctions between those things which only by their name pass for
medical remedies, and others, which in reality possess healing powers."
We avail ourselves of the quotation, as it indirectly censures the
conduct of certain medical practitioners, who do not scruple to
recommend what are vulgarly called patent and other quack preparations,
the composition of which is carefully concealed from the public. Having
acquired their unmerited reputation by mere chance, and being supported
by the most refined artifices, in order to delude the unwary, we are
unable to come at the evidence of perhaps nine tenths of those who have
experienced their fatal effects, and who are now no longer in a
situation to complain.

From universal remedies or panaceas, to nostrums and specifics, such,
for instance, as pretend to cure the _same_ disease in every patient, is
easy and natural. With the latter also, impositions of a dangerous
tendency are often practised. It may be asked how far they are
practicably admissible, and in what cases they are wholly unavailing?
The answer is not difficult. In those diseases, which in every instance
depend upon the same cause, as in agues, the small-pox, measles, and
many other contagious distempers, the possibility of specifics, in a
limited sense, may be rationally, though hypothetically admitted. But in
either maladies, the causes of which depend on a variety of other
concurrent circumstances, and the cure of which in different
individuals, frequently requires very opposite remedies, as in dropsy,
various species of colds, the almost infinite variety of consumptions,
etc. a specific remedy is an imposition u