ents by drugging as sailors bring a wind by whistling, selling lies
at a guinea apiece,--a routine, in short, of giving unfortunate sick
people a mess of things either too odious to swallow or too acrid to
hold, or, if that were possible, both at once.

--You don't know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent
country-practitioner? Then you don't know the history of medicine,--and
that is not my fault. But don't expose yourself in any outbreak of
eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxarchus was pounded! I did not
bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and all the old folios
in calf and vellum I will show you, to be bullied by the proprietor, of a
"Wood and Bache," and a shelf of peppered sheepskin reprints by
Philadelphia Editors. Besides, many of the profession and I know a
little something of each other, and you don't think I am such a simpleton
as to lose their good opinion by saying what the better heads among them
would condemn as unfair and untrue? Now mark how the great plague came
on the generation of drugging doctors, and in what form it fell.

A scheming drug-vender, (inventive genius,) an utterly untrustworthy and
incompetent observer, (profound searcher of Nature,) a shallow dabbler in
erudition, (sagacious scholar,) started the monstrous fiction (founded
the immortal system) of Homoeopathy. I am very fair, you see,---you can
help yourself to either of these sets of phrases.

All the reason in the world would not have had so rapid and general an
effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that a drug is a
good thing in itself, instead of being, as it is, a bad thing, as was
produced by the trick (system) of this German charlatan (theorist). Not
that the wiser part of the profession needed him to teach them; but the
routinists and their employers, the "general practitioners," who lived by
selling pills and mixtures, and their drug-consuming customers, had to
recognize that people could get well, unpoisoned. These dumb cattle
would not learn it of themselves, and so the murrain of Homoeopathy fell
on them.

--You don't know what plague has fallen on the practitioners of theology?
I will tell you, then. It is Spiritualism. While some are crying out
against it as a delusion of the Devil, and some are laughing at it as an
hysteric folly, and some are getting angry with it as a mere trick of
interested or mischievous persons, Spiritualism is quietly undermining
the traditio