life has been passed at the bedside of patients,
the most prominent teacher in the first Medical Faculty in the world,
the consulting physician of the King of France, and one of the most
renowned practical writers, not merely of his nation, but of his age?
I leave the quibbles by which such persons would try to creep out from
under the crushing weight of these conclusions to the unfortunates who
suppose that a reply is equivalent to an answer.

Dr. Baillie, one of the physicians in the great Hotel Dieu of Paris,
invited two Homoeopathic practitioners to experiment in his wards. One
of these was Curie, now of London, whose works are on the counters
of some of our bookstores, and probably in the hands of some of my
audience. This gentleman, whom Dr. Baillie declares to be an enlightened
man, and perfectly sincere in his convictions, brought his own medicines
from the pharmacy which furnished Hahnemann himself, and employed them
for four or five months upon patients in his ward, and with results
equally unsatisfactory, as appears from Dr. Baillie's statement at
a meeting of the Academy of Medicine. And a similar experiment was
permitted by the Clinical Professor of the Hotel Dieu of Lyons, with the
same complete failure.

But these are old and prejudiced practitioners. Very well, then take the
statement of Dr. Fleury, a most intelligent young physician, who treated
homoeopathically more than fifty patients, suffering from diseases
which it was not dangerous to treat in this way, taking every kind of
precaution as to regimen, removal of disturbing influences, and the
state of the atmosphere, insisted upon by the most vigorous partisans
of the doctrine, and found not the slightest effect produced by the
medicines. And more than this, read nine of these cases, which he has
published, as I have just done, and observe the absolute nullity of
aconite, belladonna, and bryonia, against the symptoms over which they
are pretended to exert such palpable, such obvious, such astonishing
influences. In the view of these statements, it is impossible not to
realize the entire futility of attempting to silence this asserted
science by the flattest and most peremptory results of experiment. Were
all the hospital physicians of Europe and America to devote themselves,
for the requisite period, to this sole pursuit, and were their results
to be unanimous as to the total worthlessness of the whole system in
practice, this slippery delusion wou