nreasonable. They come with a small scratch, which Nature
will heal very nicely in a few days, and insist on its being closed at
once with some kind of joiner's glue. They want their little coughs
cured, so that they may breathe at their ease, when they have no lungs
left that are worth mentioning. They would have called in Luke the
physician to John the Baptist, when his head was in the charger, and
asked for a balsam that would cure cuts. This kind of thing cannot be
done. But it is very profitable to lie about it, and say that it can
be done. The people who make a business of this lying, and profiting
by it, are called quacks.

--But as patients wish to believe in all manner of "cures," and as all
doctors love to believe in the power of their remedies and as nothing
is more open to self-deception than medical experience, the whole
matter of therapeutics has always been made a great deal more of than
the case would justify. It has been an inflated currency,--fifty
pretences on paper, to one fact of true, ringing metal.

Many of the older books are full of absurd nostrums. A century ago,
Huxham gave messes to his patients containing more than four hundred
ingredients. Remedies were ordered that must have been suggested by
the imagination; things odious, abominable, unmentionable; flesh of
vipers, powder of dead men's bones, and other horrors, best mused in
expressive silence. Go to the little book of Robert Boyle,--wise man,
philosopher, revered of cures for the most formidable diseases, many
of them of this fantastic character, that disease should seem to have
been a thing that one could turn off at will, like gas or water in our
houses. Only there were rather too many specifics in those days. For
if one has "an excellent approved remedy" that never fails, it seems
unnecessary to print a list of twenty others for the same
purpose. This is wanton excess; it is gilding the golden pill, and
throwing fresh perfume on the Mistura Assafoetidae.

As the observation of nature has extended, and as mankind have
approached the state of only _semi_-barbarism in which they now
exist, there has been an improvement. The materia medica has been
weeded; much that was worthless and revolting has been thrown
overboard; simplicity has been introduced into prescriptions; and the
whole business of _drugging_ the sick has undergone a most
salutary reform. The great fact has been practically recognized, that
the movements of life in disea