most celebrated professors of Obstetrics in this country
opposed my conclusions with all the weight of their experience and
position.

This paper was written in a great heat and with passionate indignation.
If I touched it at all I might trim its rhetorical exuberance, but I
prefer to leave it all its original strength of expression. I could not,
if I had tried, have disguised the feelings with which I regarded the
attempt to put out of sight the frightful facts which I brought forward
and the necessary conclusions to which they led. Of course the whole
matter has been looked at in a new point of view since the microbe as a
vehicle of contagion has been brought into light, and explained the
mechanism of that which was plain enough as a fact to all who were not
blind or who did not shut their eyes.

O. W. H.

BEVERLY Farms, Mass., August 3, 1891

HOMOEOPATHY AND ITS KINDRED DELUSIONS

[Two lectures delivered before the Boston Society for the Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge. 1842.]

[When a physician attempts to convince a person, who has fallen into the
Homoeopathic delusion, of the emptiness of its pretensions, he is often
answered by a statement of cases in which its practitioners are thought
to have effected wonderful cures. The main object of the first of these
Lectures is to show, by abundant facts, that such statements, made by
persons unacquainted with the fluctuations of disease and the fallacies
of observation, are to be considered in general as of little or no value
in establishing the truth of a medical doctrine or the utility of a
method of practice.

Those kind friends who suggest to a person suffering from a tedious
complaint, that he "Had better try Homoeopathy," are apt to enforce their
suggestion by adding, that "at any rate it can do no harm." This may or
may not be true as regards the individual. But it always does very great
harm to the community to encourage ignorance, error, or deception in a
profession which deals with the life and health of our fellow-creatures.
Whether or not those who countenance Homoeopathy are guilty of this
injustice towards others, the second of these Lectures may afford them
some means of determining.

To deny that good effects may happen from the observance of diet and
regimen when prescribed by Homoeopathists as well as by others, would be
very unfair to them. But to suppose that men with minds so constituted
as to accept such statements and embrace such do