esumption in
favor of whatever is nauseous and noxious as being good for the sick.

Again, we all occasionally meet persons stained with nitrate of silver,
given for epilepsy. Read what Dr. Martin says, about the way in which it
came to be used, in his excellent address before the Norfolk County
Medical Society, and the evidence I can show, but have not time for now,
and then say what you think of the practice which on such presumptions
turns a white man as blue as the double-tattooed King of the Cannibal
Islands! [Note A.]

If medical superstitions have fought their way down through all the
rationalism and scepticism of the nineteenth century, of course the
theories of the schools, supported by great names, adopted into the
popular belief and incorporated with the general mass of misapprehension
with reference to disease, must be expected to meet us at every turn in
the shape of bad practice founded on false doctrine. A French patient
complains that his blood heats him, and expects his doctor to bleed him.
An English or American one says he is bilious, and will not be easy
without a dose of calomel. A doctor looks at a patient's tongue, sees it
coated, and says the stomach is foul; his head full of the old saburral
notion which the extreme inflammation-doctrine of Broussais did so much
to root out, but which still leads, probably, to much needless and
injurious wrong of the stomach and bowels by evacuants, when all they
want is to be let alone. It is so hard to get anything out of the dead
hand of medical tradition! The mortmain of theorists extinct in science
clings as close as that of ecclesiastics defunct in law.

One practical hint may not be out of place here. It seems to be
sometimes forgotten, by those who must know the fact, that the tongue is
very different, anatomically and physiologically, from the stomach. Its
condition does not in the least imply a similar one of the stomach, which
is a very different structure, covered with a different kind of
epithelium, and furnished with entirely different secretions. A
silversmith will, for a dollar, make a small hoe, of solid silver, which
will last for centuries, and will give a patient more comfort, used for
the removal of the accumulated epithelium and fungous growths which
constitute the "fur," than many a prescription with a split-footed Rx
before it, addressed to the parts out of reach.

I think more of this little implement on account of its agency in savin