“The science of medicine is a _barbarous jargon_, and the effects of our medicines on the human system in the highest degree _uncertain_; except, indeed, that they have _destroyed more lives_ than war, pestilence, and famine combined.”--JOHN MASON GOOD, M.D., F.R.S., author of “Book of Nature,” “A System of Nosology,” “Study of Medicine,” etc. “I declare as my conscientious conviction, founded on long experience and reflection, that if there were not a single _physician_, _surgeon_, _man midwife_, _chemist_, _apothecary_, _druggist_, nor _drug_ on the face of the earth, there would be _less sickness_ and _less mortality_ than now prevail.”--JAS. JOHNSON, M.D., F.R.S., Editor of the _Medico-Chirurgical Review_. So it comes to this, that during three thousand years remedies have been accumulating until between two and three thousand drugs are recorded in the archives of the medical profession, and yet we have the admission of some of the highest authorities on the subject that the nature of disease is still a mystery, that the “_modus operandi_” of drugs is equally obscure, and that in consequence there is profound uncertainty as to the relation of drugs to the diseases for which they are prescribed. Can one cause cure another? Can a poison expel a poison? Can the human system throw off two burdens better than one? If such a proposition were submitted to us in any other domain we would indignantly resent it as an insult to our intelligence. There can be no question but that the public are largely responsible for the existing condition of things, for whatever they demand they can obtain, in obedience to the inexorable law of supply and demand: which accounts for the rapidly increasing interest in hygiene. An eminent authority on therapeutics says: “The medical profession holds a most false relation to society. Its honors and emoluments are measured, not by the good, but by the evil it does. The physician who keeps some member of the family of his rich neighbor on a bed of sickness for months or years, may secure to himself thereby both fame and fortune; while the other who would restore the patient to health in a week or two, will be neither appreciated nor understood. If a physician, in treating a simple fever, which if left to itself or to Nature would terminate in health in two or three weeks, drugs the patient into half a dozen chronic diseases, and nearly kills himself half a dozen times, and prolongs his sufferings for months, he will receive much money and many thanks for carrying him safely through so many complications, relapses, and collapses. But if he cures in a single week, and leaves him perfectly sound, the pay will be small, and the thanks nowhere, because he has not been very sick!”