shed better by simple means than by
the heroic measures hitherto thought necessary. In a word, scientific
empiricism was beginning to gain a hearing in medicine as against the
metaphysical preconceptions of the earlier generations.

PARASITIC DISEASES

I have just adverted to the fact that Napoleon Bonaparte, as First
Consul and as Emperor, was the victim of a malady which caused him to
seek the advice of the most distinguished physicians of Paris. It is a
little shocking to modern sensibilities to read that these physicians,
except Corvisart, diagnosed the distinguished patient's malady as "gale
repercutee"--that is to say, in idiomatic English, the itch "struck in."
It is hardly necessary to say that no physician of today would make
so inconsiderate a diagnosis in the case of a royal patient. If by
any chance a distinguished patient were afflicted with the itch, the
sagacious physician would carefully hide the fact behind circumlocutions
and proceed to eradicate the disease with all despatch. That the
physicians of Napoleon did otherwise is evidence that at the beginning
of the century the disease in question enjoyed a very different status.
At that time itch, instead of being a most plebeian malady, was, so to
say, a court disease. It enjoyed a circulation, in high circles and in
low, that modern therapeutics has quite denied it; and the physicians
of the time gave it a fictitious added importance by ascribing to its
influence the existence of almost any obscure malady that came under
their observation. Long after Napoleon's time gale continued to hold
this proud distinction. For example, the imaginative Dr. Hahnemann did
not hesitate to affirm, as a positive maxim, that three-fourths of all
the ills that flesh is heir to were in reality nothing but various forms
of "gale repercutee."

All of which goes to show how easy it may be for a masked pretender to
impose on credulous humanity, for nothing is more clearly established in
modern knowledge than the fact that "gale repercutee" was simply a name
to hide a profound ignorance; no such disease exists or ever did exist.
Gale itself is a sufficiently tangible reality, to be sure, but it is a
purely local disease of the skin, due to a perfectly definite cause,
and the dire internal conditions formerly ascribed to it have really no
causal connection with it whatever. This definite cause, as every one
nowadays knows, is nothing more or less than a microscopic insect wh