It is rather difficult for the unskilled mind of a ‘regular’ to reconcile with the ‘simple and plain theory’ of Thompson, these facts—that persons sometimes die with a great degree of heat upon them—that heat sometimes remains in the body for a long time after death—that in the cholera there is occasionally found after death a great amount of heat, though the patient’s body was very cold for many hours before death, &c. I once asked a Thompsonian the reason of this last fact. ‘Why,’ said he, ‘that is plain enough—the disease was so powerful it kept down the heat, but when the patient died, the disease let go, and then the heat came out.’ The answer was at least ingenious. But Thompson says, ‘if the heat gains the victory, the cold will be disinherited, and health will be restored.’ The warm corpse of the cholera patient ought, therefore, to have revived. It is asserted by the followers of Thompson, that there is no need of ‘learned doctors.’ They declare that ‘the whole theory and practice, is perfectly plain and simple, requiring no study of the dead languages to comprehend it, thereby enabling any person of common capacity to practice with a certainty of success, in all ordinary cases of disease, and this too with but a few hours instruction.’ And, Thompson himself speaks of the art of medicine, as being as plain and as easy, as the clearing of ‘a stove and the pipe, when clogged with soot.’ The Thompsonian system dispenses with the services of ‘learned doctors,’ for another reason also. It claims that, while other medicines invariably injure the system, the Thompsonian remedies always benefit it, both in sickness and in health. No matter how much they are used, nor at what times—they always do good, for they have, it is claimed, a natural relation to the system. Many Thompsonians carry this idea still farther than this. A prominent physician of this class, one sufficiently orthodox and accomplished to be for a long time an editor of one of their papers, attributed a sort of selecting power to lobelia. He said, that it would never bring up anything that it ought not to bring up, and that if a man with a foul stomach, should eat a good dinner, and then take lobelia, nothing but the bad matter would be thrown off, and the dinner would stay there to nourish the system.