ctions daily convince us of our ignorance of disease, and cause us
to blush at our prescriptions. What mischief have we done under the
belief of false facts and theories! We have assisted in multiplying
diseases; we have done more; we have increased their mortality.... The
art of healing is like an unroofed temple, uncovered at the top, and
cracked at the foundation."

Magendie, late a distinguished French physician and physiologist, says,
as follows:--

"I hesitate not to declare,--no matter how sorely I shall wound our
vanity,--that so gross is our ignorance of the real nature of the
physiological disorders called diseases, that it would, perhaps, be
better to do nothing, and resign the complaint we are called upon to
treat, to the resources of nature, than to act, as we are frequently
compelled to do, without knowing the why and the wherefore of our
conduct, and at the obvious risk of hastening the end of our patient."

Dr. Good, a learned and voluminous British writer, also says:--

"The science of medicine is a barbarous jargon; and the effects of our
medicines upon the human system, are, in the highest degree, uncertain,
except, indeed, that they have already destroyed more lives than war,
pestilence, and famine combined."

Professor Clark, of the Harvard Medical School, in Boston, in an address
of his, recently published, insists, again and again, that medicine
never cures, and that it rarely, if ever, so much as _aids_ nature;
while he exalts, in an unwonted degree, the remedial effects of every
hygienic influence. Let him who longer doubts, read this most remarkable
production; and with the more care from the fact that it is a very fair
exponent of the doctrines now held at the very fountain-head of medical
orthodoxy.

From a work entitled, "Memoirs of James Jackson, Jr.," late of Boston,
written by his father, I have extracted the following. It is part of a
letter, written from Europe, to his venerable father, the present elder
Dr. James Jackson, of Boston.

"But our poor pathology and worse therapeutics--shall we ever get to a
solid bottom? Shall we ever have fixed laws? Shall we ever _know_, or,
must we always be doomed to _suspect_, to _presume_? Is _perhaps_ to be
our qualifying word forever and for aye? Must we forever be obliged to
hang our heads when the chemist and natural philosopher ask us for our
laws and principles?... If honest, must we not acknowledge that, even in
the natural history of