ician
and the Homoeopathist, as it once did between Luther and the Romanists.
The practitioner and the scholar must not, therefore, smile at the
amount of time and labor expended in these Lectures upon this shadowy
system; which, in the calm and serious judgment of many of the wisest
members of the medical profession, is not entitled by anything it has
ever said or done to the notoriety of a public rebuke, still less to the
honors of critical martyrdom.]

I

I have selected four topics for this lecture, the first three of which I
shall touch but slightly, the last more fully. They are

1. The Royal cure of the King's Evil, or Scrofula.

2. The Weapon Ointment, and its twin absurdity, the Sympathetic Powder.

3. The Tar-water mania of Bishop Berkeley.

4. The History of the Metallic Tractors, or Perkinism.

The first two illustrate the ease with which numerous facts are
accumulated to prove the most fanciful and senseless extravagances.

The third exhibits the entire insufficiency of exalted wisdom,
immaculate honesty, and vast general acquirements to make a good
physician of a great bishop.

The fourth shows us the intimate machinery of an extinct delusion, which
flourished only forty years ago; drawn in all its details, as being
a rich and comparatively recent illustration of the pretensions, the
arguments, the patronage, by means of which windy errors have long been,
and will long continue to be, swollen into transient consequence.
All display in superfluous abundance the boundless credulity and
excitability of mankind upon subjects connected with medicine.

"From the time of Edward the Confessor to Queen Anne, the monarchs of
England were in the habit of touching those who were brought to them
suffering with the scrofula, for the cure of that distemper. William
the Third had good sense enough to discontinue the practice, but Anne
resumed it, and, among her other patients, performed the royal operation
upon a child, who, in spite of his, disease, grew up at last into Samuel
Johnson. After laying his hand upon the sufferers, it was customary for
the monarch to hang a gold piece around the neck of each patient. Very
strict precautions were adopted to prevent those who thought more of the
golden angel hung round the neck by a white ribbon, than of relief of
their bodily infirmities, from making too many calls, as they sometimes
attempted to do. According to the statement of the advocates and
contemporarie