ith our religion and make the clergy
into physicians, or ordain our physicians into full-fledged clergymen.

The science of medicine, or what might be called the natural ways of
nature through its physical laws, is true to itself; the fault lies in
our interpretation of its phenomena, which we fail to study with
sufficient discriminative precision and nicety. We have repeatedly
mistaken causes and results from this want of close observance and of
precision, attributing results to causes which did not exist. As an
example, when the early disciples of homoeopathy in ancient Palestine
undertook to revive poor, old, withered King David, by putting him to
bed with a young and caloric-generating Sunamite maid, when it was by
like incontinent practices that he had brought himself to that state of
decrepitude, it is plain that they misunderstood the principle.
Boerhaave--who, as a true eclectic practitioner, followed these ancient
and Biblical homoeopaths in their practice in a similar case, the
subject being an old Dutch burgomaster, whom he sandwiched between a
couple of rosy Netherland maids--also failed to grasp the true condition
of the nature of things, or the true philosophical explanation. The
exhalations from the aged are by no means an elixir of health or life to
the young, and the fact that the young were apt to lose health by
sleeping with the aged was wrongly attributed to their loss being the
others' gain, and the result of its passing into the bodies of their
aged companions, and not to its true cause,--the deteriorating influence
to which they were subjected; and, further, when we analyze the subject
still more, we can understand how a full-blooded and active,
lithe-bodied, thin, and active-skinned Sunamite maid might and would
impart caloric to King David; but, from our knowledge (not altogether
practical) of the difference that exists between differently
constitutioned and differently built maids in imparting caloric, and
from our knowledge of the physique of the Netherland maids, who are cold
and impassive, with a layer of adipose tissue that answers the same
purpose as that of the blubber in the whale,--that of retaining heat and
resisting cold,--we can well believe that the poor, shriveled
burgomaster could receive but little heat, even when sandwiched between
the two; but, on the contrary, he was, in fact, more liable to lose the
little he had, unless we look at the subject in another light, and
consider t