my grandson, I will state the favor I ask
of you, and which is the object of this letter.

*****

This subject dismissed, I may now take up that which it led to, and
further tax your patience with unlearned views of medicine; which, as in
most cases, are, perhaps, the more confident in proportion as they are
less enlightened.

We know, from what we see and feel, that the animal body is in its
organs and functions subject to derangement, inducing pain, and
tending to its destruction. In this disordered state, we observe nature
providing for the re-establishment of order, by exciting some salutary
evacuation of the morbific matter, or by some other operation which
escapes our imperfect senses and researches. She brings on a crisis, by
stools, vomiting, sweat, urine, expectoration, bleeding, &c, which, for
the most part, ends in the restoration of healthy action. Experience has
taught us also, that there are certain substances, by which, applied to
the living body, internally or externally, we can at will produce these
same evacuations, and thus do, in a short time, what nature would do but
slowly, and do effectually, what perhaps she would not have strength
to accomplish. Where, then, we have seen a disease, characterized
by specific signs or phenomena, and relieved by a certain natural
evacuation or process, whenever that disease recurs under the same
appearances, we may reasonably count on producing a solution of it, by
the use of such substances as we have found produce the same evacuation
or movement. Thus, fulness of the stomach we can relieve by emetics;
diseases of the bowels, by purgatives; inflammatory cases, by bleeding;
intermittents, by the Peruvian bark; syphilis, by mercury; watchfulness,
by opium; &c. So far, I bow to the utility of medicine. It goes to the
well defined forms of disease, and happily, to those the most frequent.
But the disorders of the animal body, and the symptoms indicating
them, are as various as the elements of which the body is composed. The
combinations, too, of these symptoms are so infinitely diversified,
that many associations of them appear too rarely to establish a definite
disease: and to an unknown disease, there cannot be a known remedy.
Here, then, the judicious, the moral, the humane physician should stop.
Having been so often a witness to the salutary efforts which nature
makes to re-establish the disordered functions, he should rather trust
to their action, than hazard