you ever see a case of
epilepsy cured by nitrate of silver?" I said to one of the oldest and
most experienced surgeons in this country. "Never," was his instant
reply. Dr. Twitchell's experience was very similar. How, then, did
nitrate of silver come to be given for epilepsy? Because, as Dr. Martin
has so well reminded us, lunatics were considered formerly to be under
the special influence of Luna, the moon (which Esquirol, be it observed,
utterly denies), and lunar caustic, or nitrate of silver, is a salt of
that metal which was called luna from its whiteness, and of course
must be in the closest relations with the moon. It follows beyond all
reasonable question that the moon's metal, silver, and its preparations,
must be the specific remedy for moonblasted maniacs and epileptics!

Yet the practitioner who prescribes the nitrate of silver supposes he
is guided by the solemn experience of the past, instead of by its idle
fancies. He laughs at those old physicians who placed such confidence
in the right hind hoof of an elk as a remedy for the same disease, and
leaves the record of his own belief in a treatment quite as fanciful and
far more objectionable, written in indelible ink upon a living tablet
where he who runs may read it for a whole generation, if nature spares
his walking advertisement so long.

NOTE B.--

The presumption that a man is innocent until he is proved guilty, does
not mean that there are no rogues, but lays the onus probandi on the
party to which it properly belongs. So with this proposition. A noxious
agent should never be employed in sickness unless there is ample
evidence in the particular case to overcome the general presumption
against all such agents, and the evidence is very apt to be defective.

The miserable delusion of Homoeopathy builds itself upon an axiom
directly the opposite of this; namely, that the sick are to be cured by
poisons. Similia similibus curantur means exactly this. It is simply
a theory of universal poisoning, nullified in practice by the
infinitesimal contrivance. The only way to kill it and all similar
fancies, and to throw every quack nostrum into discredit, is to root out
completely the suckers of the old rotten superstition that whatever is
odious or noxious is likely to be good for disease. The current of sound
practice with ourselves is, I believe, setting fast in the direction
I have indicated in the above proposition. To uphold the exhibition
of noxious