e will improve upon your placebos. If an
infinitesimal dose is good, no dose at all is better--and, except in
special cases, _that_ shall henceforward be our system!'

Our readers may think this a jest; but it is actually the point at
which, on the part of the Allopathists, the controversy has arrived. A
very intelligent and intelligible paper by Dr C. Radclyffe Hall, of
Torquay, has appeared in the _Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal_,
in which the subject is treated in a pleasant and profitable way. He is
aware of the difficulty there will be in introducing the new system--of
the surprised stare with which the patient will regard the doctor 'doing
nothing;' and as confidence is an important part of the cure, the rule
cannot be made absolute. 'But as often as it can be adopted it should.
By degrees, the doctrine will work its way, that medical attendants are
required to survey, superintend, and direct disease, to watch lest harm
accrue unnoticed, to employ active remedies when required, or not to
interfere at all, as seems to their own judgment best. Every case of
successful treatment without medicines will assist to indoctrinate the
public with this view. By learning how much nature can do without
medicines, people will be able to perceive more correctly how much
medicines, when they are necessary, can assist nature.'

The following is given as an example of a case of non-interference. 'A
child, above the age of infancy, is chilly, looks dull around its eyes,
has headache, pain in the back, quick pulse, and no appetite. It is not
known that the digestive organs have been overtaxed. The case may
prove--anything. A local inflammation not yet made manifest by local
pain; the commencement of continued, or remittent, or exanthematous
fever; in a word, there is scarcely any ailment of children of which
this may not be the commencement. _If_, on careful examination, no local
disease can be made out, we have no correct indication for special
treatment. Give nature fair play. Put the child into a warm bed in a
warm room, keep it quiet, stop the supplies of food, but not of water,
and wait. When reaction takes place, if there be anything serious, it
shews itself, and we then know what to attend to. Very frequently, the
case is one of mere ephemeral febrile disorder, from exposure to cold;
and in two or three days, the child is perfectly well again, without
having taken either medicines or globules. But have we done nothing