ctrines as make up the
so-called science of Homoeopathy are more competent than others to
regulate the circumstances which influence the human body in health and
disease, would be judging very harshly the average capacity of ordinary
practitioners.

To deny that some patients may have been actually benefited through the
influence exerted upon their imaginations, would be to refuse to
Homoeopathy what all are willing to concede to every one of those
numerous modes of practice known to all intelligent persons by an
opprobrious title.

So long as the body is affected through the mind, no audacious device,
even of the most manifestly dishonest character, can fail of producing
occasional good to those who yield it an implicit or even a partial
faith. The argument founded on this occasional good would be as
applicable in justifying the counterfeiter and giving circulation to his
base coin, on the ground that a spurious dollar had often relieved a poor
man's necessities.

Homoeopathy has come before our public at a period when the growing
spirit of eclecticism has prepared many ingenious and honest minds to
listen to all new doctrines with a candor liable to degenerate into
weakness. It is not impossible that the pretended evolution of great and
mysterious virtues from infinitely attenuated atoms may have enticed a
few over-refining philosophers, who have slid into a vague belief that
matter subdivided grows less material, and approaches nearer to a
spiritual nature as it requires a more powerful microscope for its
detection.

However this may be, some persons seem disposed to take the ground of
Menzel that the Laity must pass formal judgment between the Physician and
the Homoeopathist, as it once did between Luther and the Romanists. The
practitioner and the scholar must not, therefore, smile at the amount of
time and labor expended in these Lectures upon this shadowy system;
which, in the calm and serious judgment of many of the wisest members of
the medical profession, is not entitled by anything it has ever said or
done to the notoriety of a public rebuke, still less to the honors of
critical martyrdom.]

I

I have selected four topics for this lecture, the first three of which I
shall touch but slightly, the last more fully. They are

1. The Royal cure of the King's Evil, or Scrofula.

2. The Weapon Ointment, and its twin absurdity, the Sympathetic Powder.

3. The Tar-water mania of Bishop Berkeley.

4.