, and capable
of testing the truth of the doctrine.

No person, that I am aware of, has ever denied that in some cases there
exists a resemblance between the effects of a remedy and the symptoms
of diseases in which it is beneficial. This has been recognized, as
Hahnemann himself has shown, from the time of Hippocrates. But according
to the records of the medical profession, as they have been hitherto
interpreted, this is true of only a very small proportion of useful
remedies. Nor has it ever been considered as an established truth that
the efficacy of even these few remedies was in any definite ratio to
their power of producing symptoms more or less like those they cured.

Such was the state of opinion when Hahnemann came forward with the
proposition that all the cases of successful treatment found in the
works of all preceding medical writers were to be ascribed solely to the
operation of the Homoeopathic principle, which had effected the cure,
although without the physician's knowledge that this was the real
secret. And strange as it may seem, he was enabled to give such a
degree of plausibility to this assertion, that any person not acquainted
somewhat with medical literature, not quite familiar, I should rather
say, with the relative value of medical evidence, according to the
sources whence it is derived, would be almost frightened into the
belief, at seeing the pages upon pages of Latin names he has summoned as
his witnesses.

It has hitherto been customary, when examining the writings of authors
of preceding ages, upon subjects as to which they were less enlightened
than ourselves, and which they were very liable to misrepresent, to
exercise some little discretion; to discriminate, in some measure,
between writers deserving confidence and those not entitled to it. But
there is not the least appearance of any such delicacy on the part of
Hahnemann. A large majority of the names of old authors he cites
are wholly unknown to science. With some of them I have been long
acquainted, and I know that their accounts of diseases are no more to be
trusted than their contemporary Ambroise Pare's stories of mermen,
and similar absurdities. But if my judgment is rejected, as being
a prejudiced one, I can refer to Cullen, who mentioned three of
Hahnemann's authors in one sentence, as being "not necessarily bad
authorities; but certainly such when they delivered very improbable
events;" and as this was said more than half a