at before all remedies he places the
proper conduct of the patient and his attendants, and the fit ordering
of all the conditions surrounding him. The class of practitioners I have
referred to have always been the most faithful in attending to these
points. No doubt they have sometimes prescribed unwisely, in compliance
with the prejudices of their time, but they have grown wiser as they
have grown older, and learned to trust more in nature and less in their
plans of interference. I believe common opinion confirms Sir James
Clark's observation to this effect.

The experience of the profession must, I think, run parallel with that
of the wisest of its individual members. Each time a plan of treatment
or a particular remedy comes up for trial, it is submitted to a sharper
scrutiny. When Cullen wrote his Materia Medica, he had seriously to
assail the practice of giving burnt toad, which was still countenanced
by at least one medical authority of note. I have read recently in some
medical journal, that an American practitioner, whose name is known to
the country, is prescribing the hoof of a horse for epilepsy. It was
doubtless suggested by that old fancy of wearing a portion of elk's hoof
hung round the neck or in a ring, for this disease. But it is hard
to persuade reasonable people to swallow the abominations of a former
period. The evidence which satisfied Fernelius will not serve one of our
hospital physicians.

In this way those articles of the Materia Medica which had nothing but
loathsomeness to recommend them have been gradually dropped, and are not
like to obtain any general favor again with civilized communities. The
next culprits to be tried are the poisons. I have never been in the
least sceptical as to the utility of some of them, when properly
employed. Though I believe that at present, taking the world at large,
and leaving out a few powerful agents of such immense value that they
rank next to food in importance, the poisons prescribed for disease do
more hurt than good, I have no doubt, and never professed to have any,
that they do much good in prudent and instructed hands. But I am very
willing to confess a great jealousy of many agents, and I could almost
wish to see the Materia Medica so classed as to call suspicion upon
certain ones among them.

Thus the alien elements, those which do not properly enter into
the composition of any living tissue, are the most to be suspected,
--mercury, lead, antimony