doctrine, that which declares seven eighths of all chronic
diseases to be owing to Psora.

This want of any obvious relation between Hahnemann's three cardinal
doctrines appears to be self-evident upon inspection. But if, as is
often true with his disciples, they prefer the authority of one of their
own number, I will refer them to Dr. Trinks's paper on the present state
of Homoeopathy in Europe, with which, of course, they are familiar, as
his name is mentioned as one of the most prominent champions of their
faith, in their American official organ. It would be a fact without a
parallel in the history, not merely of medicine, but of science, that
three such unconnected and astonishing discoveries, each of them a
complete revolution of all that ages of the most varied experience had
been taught to believe, should spring full formed from the brain of a
single individual.

Let us look a moment at the first of his doctrines. Improbable though
it may seem to some, there is no essential absurdity involved in the
proposition that diseases yield to remedies capable of producing like
symptoms. There are, on the other hand, some analogies which lend a
degree of plausibility to the statement. There are well-ascertained
facts, known from the earliest periods of medicine, showing that, under
certain circumstances, the very medicine which, from its known effects,
one would expect to aggravate the disease, may contribute to its relief.
I may be permitted to allude, in the most general way, to the case in
which the spontaneous efforts of an overtasked stomach are quieted by
the agency of a drug which that organ refuses to entertain upon any
terms. But that every cure ever performed by medicine should have
been founded upon this principle, although without the knowledge of a
physician; that the Homoeopathic axiom is, as Hahnemann asserts, "the
sole law of nature in therapeutics," a law of which nothing more than
a transient glimpse ever presented itself to the innumerable host of
medical observers, is a dogma of such sweeping extent, and pregnant
novelty, that it demands a corresponding breadth and depth of
unquestionable facts to cover its vast pretensions.

So much ridicule has been thrown upon the pretended powers of the
minute doses that I shall only touch upon this point for the purpose of
conveying, by illustrations, some shadow of ideas far transcending the
powers of the imagination to realize. It must be remembered that these