I am unable to say how far this power inherent in Apis, of producing
miscarriage, may be serviceable to females who are prone to miscarriage.

I beg the privilege of adding a more general warning to this particular
one. The more generally useful a thing is, the more liable is it to
abuse. The most important and useful discoveries of hom[oe]opathy are
abused in this manner by our age given to all sorts of excesses.

Not only are the records of hom[oe]opathy ransacked by speculative
minds, who use her advantages for personal gain without giving due
credit to the source whence the good things are obtained. This species
of egotism may perhaps be excused in consideration of the use which this
kind of plagiarism affords, even if whole volumes should be filled with
it. But if the stolen property is paraded before the world as something
belonging to one's self by right divine; if official influence is abused
for the purpose of dressing up that which rightfully belongs to our
science, as some original discovery, thus caricaturing and disfiguring
the beauty of the genuine blessing; then good is changed to evil, and
the evil is the greater, the more comprehensive the truth that is so
shamefully abused. It is absurd and may entail sad consequences upon the
world, if the rational use of Apis is to be converted to the irrational
proceedings of the so-called specific method, which is often practised
by men who, knowing better, purposely conceal the truth from the world.
For years past, I have been called upon again and again, by patients who
had been in the hands of these men, and who had been drenched with
medicine, and had had all sorts of disastrous complications engendered
in their poor bodies, to afford them some relief from these tortures
inflicted by physicians who do not hesitate to assail the health of
their patients by massive doses of drugs, of which they often know
nothing but the name.

With these facts before me, nobody can find it strange that I should
feel some misgivings in laying before the world a drug endowed with such
extensive virtues. Apis is one of those drugs, the abuse of which may
prove as destructive as the use of it is a source of saving good. It is
no anti-psoric, nor is it capable of antidoting the three miasms, or of
inflicting medicinal diseases for life. Nevertheless, it is a deeply and
speedily-acting drug, for it affects the whole internal mucous membrane,
the nervous system, and the process of