h the Creator
himself seems to prescribe, for we often see the scarlet poppy growing in
the cornfields, as if it were foreseen that wherever there is hunger to
be fed there must also be pain to be soothed; throw out a few specifics
which our art did not discover, and is hardly needed to apply [ Note C.];
throw out wine, which is a food, and the vapors which produce the miracle
of anaesthesia, and I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica, as
now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the
better for mankind,--and all the worse for the fishes.

But to justify this proposition, I must add that the injuries inflicted
by over-medication are to a great extent masked by disease. Dr. Hooker
believes that the typhus syncopatia of a preceding generation in New
England "was often in fact a brandy and opium disease." How is a
physician to distinguish the irritation produced by his blister from that
caused by the inflammation it was meant to cure? How can he tell the
exhaustion produced by his evacuants from the collapse belonging to the
disease they were meant to remove?

Lastly, medication without insuring favorable hygienic conditions is like
amputation without ligatures. I had a chance to learn this well of old,
when physician to the Broad Street district of the Boston Dispensary.
There, there was no help for the utter want of wholesome conditions, and
if anybody got well under my care, it must have been in virtue of the
rough-and-tumble constitution which emerges from the struggle for life in
the street gutters, rather than by the aid of my prescriptions.

But if the materia medica were lost overboard, how much more pains would
be taken in ordering all the circumstances surrounding the patient (as
can be done everywhere out of the crowded pauper districts), than are
taken now by too many who think they do their duty and earn their money
when they write a recipe for a patient left in an atmosphere of domestic
malaria, or to the most negligent kind of nursing! I confess that I
should think my chance of recovery from illness less with Hippocrates for
my physician and Mrs. Gamp for my nurse, than if I were in the hands of
Hahnemann himself, with Florence Nightingale or good Rebecca Taylor to
care for me.

If I am right in maintaining that the presumption is always against the
use of noxious agents in disease, and if any whom I might influence
should adopt this as a principle of practice, they will