once upon his patients and
the future prospects of Homoeopathy.

If, as must be admitted, no one of Hahnemann's doctrines is received
with tolerable unanimity among his disciples, except the central axiom,
Similia similibus curantur; if this axiom itself relies mainly for its
support upon the folly and trickery of Hahnemann, what can we think of
those who announce themselves ready to relinquish all the accumulated
treasures of our art, to trifle with life upon the strength of these
fantastic theories? What shall we think of professed practitioners of
medicine, if, in the words of Jahr, "from ignorance, for their personal
convenience, or through charlatanism, they treat their patients one
day Homoeopathically and the next Allopathically;" if they parade their
pretended new science before the unguarded portion of the community;
if they suffer their names to be coupled with it wherever it may gain a
credulous patient; and deny all responsibility for its character, refuse
all argument for its doctrines, allege no palliation for the ignorance
and deception interwoven with every thread of its flimsy tissue, when
they are questioned by those competent to judge and entitled to an
answer?

Such is the pretended science of Homoeopathy, to which you are asked to
trust your lives and the lives of those dearest to you. A mingled mass
of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel erudition, of imbecile credulity, and
of artful misrepresentation, too often mingled in practice, if we
may trust the authority of its founder, with heartless and shameless
imposition. Because it is suffered so often to appeal unanswered to the
public, because it has its journals, its patrons, its apostles, some
are weak enough to suppose it can escape the inevitable doom of utter
disgrace and oblivion. Not many years can pass away before the same
curiosity excited by one of Perkins's Tractors will be awakened at the
sight of one of the Infinitesimal Globules. If it should claim a longer
existence, it can only be by falling into the hands of the sordid
wretches who wring their bread from the cold grasp of disease and death
in the hovels of ignorant poverty.

As one humble member of a profession which for more than two thousand
years has devoted itself to the pursuit of the best earthly interests
of mankind, always assailed and insulted from without by such as are
ignorant of its infinite perplexities and labors, always striving in
unequal contest with the hundred-arme