Homœopathy : report of the speeches on irregular practice delivered at the nineteenth anniversary meeting of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, held at Brighton, August 13 & 14, 1851.

Date:
1851
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Homœopathy : report of the speeches on irregular practice delivered at the nineteenth anniversary meeting of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, held at Brighton, August 13 & 14, 1851. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    disease (the squamous forms), and in diseases of a periodic type, his dose being one-sixteenth of a grain, or from five to ten or fifteen minims of Fowler’s solution, George E. Day. Dr. Day to Dr. Hale. Dear Sir,—There is an article in The Lancet of this week asserting that you have been, and still are, practising homoeopathy. As no homoeopathist, without utterly denying his creed, and being guilty of the grossest deception, could have replied as you did to the practical questions, I entertain a sanguine hope that you will meet this charge with a prompt and distinct denial. In order at once to check a report equally injurious to yourself, and to the University from which you have received your degree, I forward by this post to The Lancet certain extracts from your answers to the practical questions, and a copy of the note I have now the honour of addressing you. I am, dear Sir, faithfully yours, Dr. Robert Douglas Hale. George E. Day. Dr. Hale to Dr. Day. St. Giles’s-street, Norwich, June 12, 1851. Dear Sir,—It would have been more courteous to have waited for a reply from me before sending your communication to The Lancet. I shall therefore simply state, that it was not my business to declare myself a homoeopathist, and that I think your expression of “ grossest deception” is wholly inapplicable either to me or to any one who, under such circumstances, practises such reserve as I did. The obvious aim I had in view in replying to the questions put at my examination, was to prove that my knowledge of medicine was such as to entitle me to.the certificate of competency to practise in the usual mode followed, and that it was not from ignorance of the old system that I had conscientiously adopted the new. I cannot imagine that you, or any right-minded man who considers the present state of medicine, and of medical parties in these realms, would, after due con¬ sideration,. apply the term you have used, to a reserve so necessa-ry as that I practised, in not putting forward my therapeutical views. . For the censure or praise of a bigoted and prejudiced periodical I care but little, but I do regret that my conduct should for a moment appear in a light it ill deserves, in the eyes of the enlightened Professor of Medicine in the Univer¬ sity from which I have had the honour of receiving my degree. I remain, dear Sir, very faithfully yours, m _ Robert Douglas Hale. To George Day, Esq., M.D, Dr. Day’s Answer. n St. Andrew’s, June 14, 1851. IJear Sir,—I regret that your answer to my note is of so unsatisfactory a nature. WhileJ beg to assure you that I have no wish to apply the term grossest deception” to your conduct in a personally offensive view, I must still express my opinion that no honest homoeopath, conscious that the examiners trusted to his honour “to specify the mode of treatment he is in the habit of adopting, and the doses of the medicines which he prescribes”, could have ob¬ tained his degree at our last examination. m i I am, dear Sir, faithfully yours, To Dr. Robert Douglas Hale. _ George E. Day. sb,i!J successfully has vindicated the orthodoxy of his University, and has obtain a 1 ',s lmpossible, for the future, for homoeopathic practitioners to hood aH“ed‘cal^ef f from ‘hat institution, except by prevarication and false- This is a^Lp^Usir.] 6en 0ff ^ °f St' And™’s *»*<>» ? RICHARDS, 37, GREAT QUEEN-STREET LONDON.