"What is the honest truth," he says at another time, "about the medical art? By far the largest number of diseases which physicians are called to treat will get well at any rate, even in spite of reasonably bad treatment. Of the other fraction, a certain number will inevitably die, whatever is done: there remains a small margin of cases where the life of the patient depends on the skill of the physician. Drugs now and then save life; they often shorten disease and remove symptoms; but they are second in importance to food, air, temperature, and the other hygienic influences. That was a shrewd trick of Alexander's physician on the occasion of his attack after bathing. He asked three days to prepare his medicine. Time is the great physician as well as the great consoler. Sensible men in all ages have trusted most to nature." Of quacks and other humbugs, Doctor Holmes had an undisguised, wholesome contempt. "Shall we try," he says, "the medicines advertised with the certificates of justices of the peace, of clergymen, or even members of Congress? Certainly, it may be answered, any one of them which makes a good case for itself. But the difficulty is, that the whole class of commercial remedies are shown by long experience, with the rarest exceptions, to be very sovereign cures for empty pockets, and of no peculiar efficacy for anything else. You may be well assured that if any really convincing evidence was brought forward in behalf of the most vulgar nostrum, the chemists would go at once to work to analyze it, the physiologists to experiment with it, and the young doctors would all be trying it on their own bodies, if not on their patients. But we do not think it worth while, as a general rule, to send a Cheap Jack's gilt chains and lockets to be tested for gold. We know they are made to sell, and so with the pills and potions.... Think how rapidly any real discovery is appropriated and comes into universal use. Take anæsthetics, take the use of bromide of potassium, and see how easily they obtained acceptance. If you are disposed to think any of the fancy systems has brought forward any new remedy of value which the medical profession has been slow to accept, ask any fancy practitioner to name it. Let him name one,--the best his system claims,--not a hundred, but one. A single new, efficient, trustworthy remedy which the medical profession can test as they are ready to test before any scientific tribunal, opium, quinine, ether, the bromide of potassium. There is no such remedy on which any of the fancy practitioners dare stake his reputation. If there were, it would long ago have been accepted, though it had been flowers of brimstone from the borders of Styx or Cocytus." Homoeopathy is classed by Doctor Holmes among such "Kindred Delusions" as the Royal Cure for the King's Evil, the Weapon Ointment, the Sympathetic Powder, the Tar-water mania of Bishop Berkeley, and the Metallic Tractors, or Perkinsism.