the first attacks of the same complaint, they did not experience the same effects from it; still the same prepossession is continued in its favour, that was formed on its supposed success on the first trial; and although the patient, did not find himself better for several days after taking it in this last instance, they persisted in imputing his recovery to the favourite receipt, and in thinking that without the assistance of it, the disease would have been more tedious, and more severe. Nor is it of any avail to remove this prejudice, their seeing that others, who neither make use of that or any other remedy, do not suffer more prolix, or more acute pain than those who apply it; for although they see they will not perceive it; and if they do perceive it, they will not attend to or acknowledge it. SECT. XIII. L. There is a certain delusion, that is very fortunate for the apothecaries, and very fatal to the sick, that is derived from a persuasion in many of these last, that their diseases would be eternal, or incurable, without the help of medicine; although they see every day, others cured of the same diseases, without this aid; and although the disorder was of so slight a sort, that all those who did nothing but leave nature to itself, recovered from it, he who called in a physician, upon his getting well, thanked the doctor for his cure, when in reality, he perhaps did nothing but delay it. I protest that when catarrhs have been epidemical, I have in various instances observed, that they lasted as long with those who took medicines, as they did with those who took none; and the only difference that I could perceive between them was, that the last recovered their natural state of robustness as soon as the catarrh left them; and that those who had taken physic, did not recover it till several days afterwards. LI. There is another mistake said to be built upon experience, under the deception of which, many shelter themselves, and pretend, in opposition to those who differ from them in opinion, to justify the necessity of plentiful evacuations. The rigid Helmonists, or sectaries of Van Helmont, reprobate as prejudicial, purging and bleeding, in every case whatever; and in opposition to this doctrine, is urged the common experience, deduced from the cases of an infinite number of patients, who have been purged and blooded, and have all done well; and that there have been some weeks in sickly times, in which one physician has ordered a hundred patients to be purged, and as many to be blooded, and that not one of them has died. How then in opposition to this experience, say the Galenists, can any one pretend to insist, that bleeding and purging do harm?