, before it is too late. Do not plead your want of
knowledge and experience: a whip in the hand of a child is less
dangerous than a double-edged sword in the hand of a fencing-master. I
have known many a mother to treat her child for scarlet-fever, measles,
small-pox, croup, &c., after my books, or after prescriptions received
in Graefenberg and other hydriatic establishments, and I scarcely
remember a case of accident, whilst those treated in the usual mode by
the best physicians would die in numbers. I repeat it: there is no
danger in the _wet-sheet pack_, and should a patient die under the
treatment prescribed by me, you may be sure, he would not have lived
under any other mode of treatment.

128. REBELLION!

_This is preaching rebellion!_

I know it is, and it is with great reluctance that I preach it, as I am
by no means in favor of taking medical matters out of the hands where
they belong, to place them into the hands of such as have had no medical
education. I despise quackery, and I wish physicians could be prevailed
upon to take the matter in their own hands. But, the following anecdote
will enable you to judge what we may expect in that quarter, and whether
I am justified in preaching rebellion against the old routine--for I
deny going against science and the profession--and for a new practice
which has proved to be safer than any hitherto adopted.

129. FACTS.

In 1845-46 there was an epidemic in Dresden, a city of 100,000
inhabitants, where I then resided. Its ravages in the city and the
densely peopled country around it, were dreadful. We had excellent
physicians of different schools, who exerted themselves day and night to
stop the progress of extermination, but all was in vain. Dying children
and weeping mothers were found in some house of every street, and
whenever you entered a dry-goods store, you were sure to find people
buying mourning. At last, as poverty will frequently produce dispute
and quarrel in families, there arose, from similar reasons, a dispute
between the different sects of physicians in the papers, which became
more and more animated and venomous, without having any beneficial
influence upon the dying patients. Sad with the result of the efforts,
and disgusted with the quarrel of the profession, I gathered facts of my
own and other hydriatic physicians' practice, by which it was shown that
I alone, in upwards of one hundred cases of scarlatina, I had treated,
had not lost a pa