mankind, the cause of their severest bodily and mental
calamities, cancer and consumption, idiocy and madness, must excite our
unqualified surprise. And when the originator of this singular truth
ascribes, as in the page now open before me, the declining health of a
disgraced courtier, the chronic malady of a bereaved mother, even the
melancholy of the love-sick and slighted maiden, to nothing more nor less
than the insignificant, unseemly, and almost unmentionable ITCH, does it
not seem as if the very soil upon which we stand were dissolving into
chaos, over the earthquake-heaving of discovery?

And when one man claims to have established these three independent
truths, which are about as remote from each other as the discovery of the
law of gravitation, the invention of printing, and that of the mariner's
compass, unless the facts in their favor are overwhelming and unanimous,
the question naturally arises, Is not this man deceiving himself, or
trying to deceive others?

I proceed to examine the proofs of the leading ideas of Hahnemann and his
school.

In order to show the axiom, similia similibus curantur (or like is cured
by like), to be the basis of the healing art,--"the sole law of nature in
therapeutics,"--it is necessary,

1. That the symptoms produced by drugs in healthy persons should be
faithfully studied and recorded.

2. That drugs should be shown to be always capable of curing those
diseases most like their own symptoms.

3. That remedies should be shown not to cure diseases when they do not
produce symptoms resembling those presented in these diseases.

1. The effects of drugs upon healthy persons have been studied by
Hahnemann and his associates. Their results were made known in his
Materia Medica, a work in three large volumes in the French translation,
published about eight years ago. The mode of experimentation appears to
have been, to take the substance on trial, either in common or minute
doses, and then to set down every little sensation, every little movement
of mind or body, which occurred within many succeeding hours or days, as
being produced solely by the substance employed. When I have enumerated
some of the symptoms attributed to the power of the drugs taken, you will
be able to judge how much value is to be ascribed to the assertions of
such observers.

The following list was taken literally from the Materia Medica of
Hahnemann, by my friend M. Vernois, for whose accuracy I am wi