Education, Medical -- Massachusetts -- 19th century; Homeopathy; Libraries, Medical -- Massachusetts -- 19th century; Medicine
The miserable delusion of Homoeopathy builds itself upon an axiom
directly the opposite of this; namely, that the sick are to be cured by
poisons. Similia similibus curantur means exactly this. It is simply
a theory of universal poisoning, nullified in practice by the
infinitesimal contrivance. The only way to kill it and all similar
fancies, and to throw every quack nostrum into discredit, is to root out
completely the suckers of the old rotten superstition that whatever is
odious or noxious is likely to be good for disease. The current of sound
practice with ourselves is, I believe, setting fast in the direction
I have indicated in the above proposition. To uphold the exhibition
of noxious agents in disease, as the rule, instead of admitting them
cautiously and reluctantly as the exception, is, as I think, an eddy of
opinion in the direction of the barbarism out of which we believe our
art is escaping. It is only through the enlightened sentiment and
action of the Medical Profession that the community can be brought to
acknowledge that drugs should always be regarded as evils.
It is true that some suppose, and our scientific and thoughtful
associate, Dr. Gould, has half countenanced the opinion, that there may
yet be discovered a specific for every disease. Let us not despair of
the future, but let us be moderate in our expectations. When an oil is
discovered that will make a bad watch keep good time; when a recipe is
given which will turn an acephalous foetus into a promising child; when
a man can enter the second time into his mother's womb and give her back
the infirmities which twenty generations have stirred into her blood,
and infused into his own through hers, we may be prepared to enlarge the
National Pharmacopoeia with a list of specifies for everything but old
age,--and possibly for that also.
NOTE C.--
The term specific is used here in its ordinary sense, without raising
the question of the propriety of its application to these or other
remedies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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