is confidence can be
impaired by any investigations which tend to limit the application of
troublesome, painful, uncertain, or dangerous remedies. Nay, I will
venture to say this, that if every specific were to fail utterly, if the
cinchona trees all died out, and the arsenic mines were exhausted, and
the sulphur regions were burned up, if every drug from the vegetable,
animal, and mineral kingdom were to disappear from the market, a body of
enlightened men, organized as a distinct profession, would be required
just as much as now, and respected and trusted as now, whose province
should be to guard against the causes of disease, to eliminate them if
possible when still present, to order all the conditions of the patient
so as to favor the efforts of the system to right itself, and to give
those predictions of the course of disease which only experience can
warrant, and which in so many cases relieve the exaggerated fears of
sufferers and their friends, or warn them in season of impending danger.
Great as the loss would be if certain active remedies could no longer be
obtained, it would leave the medical profession the most essential part
of it's duties, and all, and more than all, its present share of honors;
for it would be the death-blow to charlatanism, which depends for its
success almost entirely on drugs, or at least on a nomenclature that
suggests them.

There is no offence, then, or danger in expressing the opinion, that,
after all which has been said, the community is still overdosed: The best
proof of it is, that "no families take so little medicine as those of
doctors, except those of apothecaries, and that old practitioners are
more sparing of active medicines than younger ones." [Dr. James Jackson
has kindly permitted me to make the following extract from a letter just
received by him from Sir James Clark, and dated May 26, 1860: "As a
physician advances in age, he generally, I think, places less confidence
in the ordinary medical treatment than he did, not only during his early,
but even his middle period of life."] The conclusion from these facts is
one which the least promising of Dr. Howe's pupils in the mental
department could hardly help drawing.

Part of the blame of over-medication must, I fear, rest with the
profession, for yielding to the tendency to self-delusion, which seems
inseparable from the practice of the art of healing. I need only touch
on the common modes of misunderstanding or misappl