But this effort is not to begin in this class. There is still another class of physicians who are to originate it. They are the men in our profession who have always pursued an honorable course, and have never yielded to the temptations to use the arts of empiricism, however strong they may have been—who, though they have often seen their brethren use such arts successfully in their competition with them without injuring their standing in the community, have never allowed such mortifications to induce them to swerve from the path of honor and duty. Efforts, it is true, have been made by such physicians to enlighten the public mind in relation to its false estimates of professional merit; but they have been for the most part isolated and individual efforts, and they have soon been given up for reasons to which I have before alluded. A general and united effort is needed, and I have no doubt that it would be successful. FOOTNOTES: [34] We had some years ago, says Dr. Rush in one of his lectures, a physician in this city of sprightly talents, who was an habitual drunkard. Soon after his death, I was called to attend a gentleman who had been one of his constant patients. He submitted with reluctance to my prescriptions, because they were contrary to the modes of practice of his former physician, to whom he was so much attached, that he declared he would rather be prescribed for by him when drunk, than by any sober physician in the city. CHAPTER XI. MEANS OF REMOVING QUACKERY. It must be obvious to any one who observes the wide influence which quackery maintains in its various forms in the community, amid all the efforts which are made to overthrow it, that there has as yet been discovered no adequate remedy for this evil. It is common for physicians to say that there is no remedy—that there is, and always will be, a class of persons who must, from the very character of their minds, be addicted to quackery; and that it is of no avail to attempt to deliver them from their errors, but they must be left to go from one delusion to another, as they choose, all their lives. If quackery were confined to such persons, it would, I allow, be idle to talk of any remedy. But it is not so confined. We every day see men, who are intelligent and judicious on other subjects, perfectly deceived and captivated with the false pretensions of empiricism. If these individuals were ignorant, and were easily influenced by merely plausible reasoning, or were enthusiastic, or over fond of novelty and change, then 1 should despair of making any impression upon them. But as this is not the case, I am led to the conclusion, that there must be some defects in the _mode_ in which truth on the subject of medicine has been presented to their minds; and that the sources of error have not been so plainly revealed to their view in this, as they have been in other fields of enquiry.