alculated to lessen their pecuniary advantages by its tendency
to extirpate a fertile source of professional practice."

In the same year the Medical Committee of Paris spoke of vaccination in a
public letter, as "the most brilliant and most important discovery of the
eighteenth century." The Directors of a Society for the Extermination of
the Small-Pox, in a Report dated October 1st, 1807, "congratulate the
public on the very favorable opinion which the Royal College of
Physicians of London, after a most minute and laborious investigation
made by the command of his Majesty, have a second time expressed on the
subject of vaccination, in their Report laid before the House of Commons,
in the last session of Parliament; in consequence of which the sum of
twenty thousand pounds was voted to Dr. Jenner, as a remuneration for his
discovery, in addition to ten thousand pounds before granted." (In June,
1802.)

These and similar accusations, so often brought up against the Medical
Profession, are only one mode in which is manifested a spirit of
opposition not merely to medical science, but to all science, and to all
sound knowledge. It is a spirit which neither understands itself nor the
object at which it is aiming. It gropes among the loose records of the
past, and the floating fables of the moment, to glean a few truths or
falsehoods tending to prove, if they prove anything, that the persons who
have passed their lives in the study of a branch of knowledge the very
essence of which must always consist in long and accurate observation,
are less competent to judge of new doctrines in their own department than
the rest of the community. It belongs to the clown in society, the
destructive in politics, and the rogue in practice.

The name of Harvey, whose great discovery was the legitimate result of
his severe training and patient study, should be mentioned only to check
the pretensions of presumptuous ignorance. The example of Jenner, who
gave his inestimable secret, the result of twenty-two years of experiment
and researches, unpurchased, to the public,--when, as was said in
Parliament, he might have made a hundred thousand pounds by it as well as
any smaller sum,--should be referred to only to rebuke the selfish
venders of secret remedies, among whom his early history obliges us
reluctantly to record Samuel Hahnemann. Those who speak of the great body
of physicians as if they were united in a league to support the
superannua