ho inherit such a
predisposition?

CHAPTER LXVII.

TIC DOULOUREUX.

Some fifty years ago, I saw in a Connecticut paper, a brief notice of
the death of an individual in Wellingworth, in that State, from a
disease which, as the paper proceeded to state,--and justly too,--not
one in a million had then ever felt, and which not many at that time had
ever heard of; viz., _tic douloureux_.

This notice, though it may have excited much curiosity,--it certainly
arrested my own attention,--did not give us much light as to the nature
of the disease. "What _is_ tic douloureux?" I asked my friends; for at
that time, of course, I knew nothing of the study of medicine. They
could not tell me. "Why do medical men," I asked, "give us such strange
names? Is it to keep up the idea of mystery, as connected with the
profession, in order thus to maintain an influence which modest worth
cannot secure?"

It was largely believed at that time, by myself and many others, that
science, like wealth,--especially medical science,--was aristocratical;
that the learned world, though they saw the republican tendencies of
things, were predisposed to throw dust in the people's eyes as long as
they could. The fact that almost all our medicines, whether in the
condition in which we see them labelled at the apothecary's shop, or as
prescribed by the family physician, have Latin names,--was often quoted
in proof of this aristocratic feeling and tendency.

Now there was doubtless some foundation for this opinion. Medical men
did then and still very generally do believe, that it is better, on the
whole, for the mass of mankind to have nothing to do with these matters,
except at the prescription of those who have given the best part of
their lives to the study of medicine and disease. That they are weapons
of so much power, that even physicians--men who only partially
understand the human constitution and their influence on it--are almost
as likely to do harm with them as good, and that it is quite enough for
society to bear the evils which are connected with the regular study and
practice of the profession, without enduring a much larger host,
inflicted by those who have other professions and employments, and must
consequently be still more ignorant than their physicians. And may not
this be one reason why a foreign language has been so long retained in
connection with the names of diseases and medicines?

But though physicians entertain the be