Beyond the reasons noted for the present comparative non-use of the lancet, there has been added a pressure of an erroneous and illegitimate nature that has aided to put bleeding under a general ban more unfortunate for the sick than was the former rather indiscriminate use. Somewhat contemporaneously with the warm discussion upon bleeding carried on in the profession, and perhaps partly out of that discussion, there started up in various parts of the country an illegitimate class of practitioners, mostly illiterate and destitute of preliminary culture, interchangeably known as Botanics, Thompsonians, Eclectics, etc., whose chief stock in trade for public acceptance was denunciation, without regard to the conditions that might be met in a case, of leeching, bleeding, blistering, scarification, and other agents for cures. This denunciation found ready public credit. Not only from the mouths of the class named, but in various other ways, the prejudice they sought to create was widely diffused. Outside of the libraries of the profession you seldom see a medical book; anywhere else they have been rarities. But in many sections of the country for the last sixty years a canvass of the families would show an abundance of books, published for family reading, emanating from irregular practitioners, all of them saturated with lying abuse of the methods of treatment of the regular physicians. These books were loaned from one family to another, much as the weekly papers or the cheap novel; and they were read and believed in. The result was that many who read were indoctrinated with the belief that bleeding, no matter what the disease or the conditions, was not only not necessary, but pernicious, and often the cause of death; and there was little printed contradiction offered to disabuse the public mind of this false accusation. Co-ordinating with this means of false instruction has been and is the public press. As respectable practitioners do not stoop to the quackery of advertising, the pecuniary interest of the press, so far as means and methods for the cure of diseases is concerned, is identical with the pecuniary interests of advertising quacks. The public press sells itself to the broad diffusion of the ways and means of medical quackery in all its forms. The subsidies of impostors and patent medicine men fill up one carotid artery for the support of the press; and the influence of that press, however weak the intellect that bestrides its tripod, is more potent than a hundred of the ablest men in the profession, for the sufficient reason that the voice of the men in the profession seldom strikes the public ear through the same broad and forceful channel.