s is not conclusive against you, taken alone;
for it rises at the same time within mine. Store within your garners the
precious argument that you are not proved wrong by increase of dissent;
because there is increase of dissent against exact science. But do not
therefore _even_ yourselves to me: remember that you, Dame Divinity, have
inflicted every kind of penalty, from the stake to the stocks, in aid of
your reasoning; remember that you, Mother Medicine, have not many years ago
applied to Parliament for increase of forcible hindrance of
antipharmacopoeal drenches, pills, and powders. Who ever heard of my asking
the legislature to fine blundering circle-squarers? Remember that the D in
dogma is the D in decay; but the D in demonstration is the D in durability.

THE STATUS OF MEDICINE.

I have known a medical man--a young one--who was seriously of the opinion
that the country ought to be divided into medical parishes, with a
practitioner appointed to each, and a penalty for calling in any but the
incumbent curer. How should people know how to choose? The hair-dressers
once petitioned Parliament for an act to compel people to wear wigs. My own
opinion is of the opposite extreme, as in the following letter (_Examiner_,
April 5, 1856); which, to my surprise, I saw reprinted in a medical
journal, as a {267} plan not absolutely to be rejected. I am perfectly
satisfied that it would greatly promote true medical orthodoxy, the
predominance of well educated thinkers, and the development of their
desirable differences.

"SIR. The Medical Bill and the medical question generally is one on which
experience would teach, if people would be taught.

"The great soul question took three hundred years to settle: the little
body question might be settled in thirty years, if the decisions in the
former question were studied.

"Time was when the State believed, as honestly as ever it believed
anything, that it _might_, _could_, and _should_ find out the true doctrine
for the poor ignorant community; to which, like a worthy honest state, it
added _would_. Accordingly, by the assistance of the Church, which
undertook the physic, the surgery, and the pharmacy of sound doctrine all
by itself, it sent forth its legally qualified teachers into every parish,
and woe to the man who called in any other. They burnt that man, they
whipped him, they imprisoned him, they did everything but what was
Christian to him, all for his soul's health