ts
practice, and usually inculcates rigid dietetic and hygienic
regulations. Many homoeopathic remedies are thoroughly triturated with
sugar of milk, which renders them more palatable and efficacious.
Whether we attribute their cures to the infinitesimal doses which many
homoeopathists employ, to their "law of cure," to good nursing, or to
the power of nature, it is nevertheless true that their practice is
measurably successful. No doubt the homoeopathic practice has modified
that of the other schools, by proving that diseases may be alleviated by
smaller quantities of medicine than were formerly employed.

THE ECLECTIC SCHOOL.

This school, founded by Wooster Beach, instituted the most strenuous
opposition to the employment of mercury, antimony, the blister, and the
lancet. The members of this new school proclaimed that the action of
heroic and noxious medicines was opposed to the operation of the vital
forces, and proposed to substitute in their place safer and more
efficacious agents, derived exclusively from the vegetable kingdom. The
eclectics have investigated the properties of indigenous plants and have
discovered many valuable remedies, which a kind and bounteous nature has
so generously supplied for the healing of her children. Marked success
attended the employment of these agents. In 1852, a committee on
"Indigenous Medical Botany," appointed by the "American Medical
Association," acknowledged that the practitioners of the regular school
had been extremely ignorant of the medical virtues of plants, even of
those of their own neighborhoods. The employment of podophyllin and
leptandrin as substitutes for mercurials has been so successful that
they are now used by practitioners of all schools. Although claiming to
have been founded upon liberal principles, it may be questioned whether
its adherents have not been quite as exclusive and dogmatic as those
whom they have opposed. It cannot be denied, however, that the eclectics
have added many important remedies to the Materia Medica. Their writings
are important and useful contributions to the physician's library.

THE LIBERAL AND INDEPENDENT PHYSICIAN.

After this brief review of the various medical sects, the reader may be
curious to learn to what sect the physicians of the Invalids' Hotel and
Surgical Institute belong. Among them are to be found graduates from the
colleges of all the different schools. They are not restricted by the
tenets of any one