he habit of prescribing these
powerful alien substances in the old routine way. Mr. Metcalf will tell
you how much more sparingly they are given by our practitioners at the
present time, than when he first inaugurated the new era of pharmacy
among us. Still, the presumption in favor of poisoning out every
spontaneous reaction of outraged nature is not extinct in those who are
trusted with the lives of their fellow-citizens. "On examining the file
of prescriptions at the hospital, I discovered that they were rudely
written, and indicated a treatment, as they consisted chiefly of tartar
emetic, ipecacuanha, and epsom salts, hardly favorable to the cure of the
prevailing diarrhoea and dysenteries." In a report of a poisoning case
now on trial, where we are told that arsenic enough was found in the
stomach to produce death in twenty-four hours, the patient is said to
have been treated by arsenic, phosphorus, bryonia, aconite, nux vomica,
and muriatic acid,--by a practitioner of what school it may be imagined.

The traditional idea of always poisoning out disease, as we smoke out
vermin, is now seeking its last refuge behind the wooden cannon and
painted port-holes of that unblushing system of false scientific
pretences which I do not care to name in a discourse addressed to an
audience devoted to the study of the laws of nature in the light of the
laws of evidence. It is extraordinary to observe that the system which,
by its reducing medicine to a name and a farce, has accustomed all who
have sense enough to see through its thin artifices to the idea that
diseases get well without being "cured," should now be the main support
of the tottering poison-cure doctrine. It has unquestionably helped to
teach wise people that nature heals most diseases without help from
pharmaceutic art, but it continues to persuade fools that art can arrest
them all with its specifics.

It is worse than useless to attempt in any way to check the freest
expression of opinion as to the efficacy of any or all of the "heroic"
means of treatment employed by practitioners of different schools and
periods. Medical experience is a great thing, but we must not forget
that there is a higher experience, which tries its results in a court of
a still larger jurisdiction; that, namely, in which the laws of human
belief are summoned to the witness-box, and obliged to testify to the
sources of error which beset the medical practitioner. The verdict is as
old as