Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Mr. Liston on the respiration of sulphuric ether. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.
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![Hoinoeopatliy is certainly a very popular delusion, and, like some other delusions, exceedingly agreeable, if we could only persuade ourselves of its truth. Who would not rather be cured, cito et jucundc, by the sugar of milk, than to die, secundem artem, under the remorseless fire of a regular practitioner's proscriptioni Wliat if a man is told, by sneering opponents of the system, that the homoeopathic medicine is a very near approach to pap, and that it is exceedingly appropriate to his infan- tile credulity ! Let those laugh that win. There has been a good deal of speculation concerning the origin of homoeopathy. It has been attributed to ignorance, superstition and craft, and some are even un- charitable enough to believe that Hahnemann himself acknowledged, before his death, that it was all humbug. I profess, Mr. Editor, to be an observing man, and I think I can explain the matter to the satisfaction of every reasonable individual, of course including yourself in the category. You remember, doubtless, that in old times people had no nerves—the old gentleman in the play said that he never had any in his life. Nerves and hysterics are things of purely modern invention. The vapors and the blues owe their existence to the conventionalities of fashionable society. The hyper-sensibility which has, in these latter days, come to be considered the indispensable of refinement and fashion, seems to have extended to the stomach and bowels. A while since, an honest, rousing dose of physic was required to make an impression upon the sturdy organs of a patient—the encounter between the doctor and the disease was a fair stand-up fight, soon ended with hard blows, and no favors asked. But the fashion of us moderns, which makes a man the creation of starched dickies, high-heeled boots and tight waistcoats—the thing of a barber's brush and the tailor's yard-stick ; and angelic woman, a swaddling lusus—a heterogeneous compound of wads of cotton, French chalk, buckram, and strips of whalebone, has drawn so exquisitely fine the delicate cords of human sensibility, that the 30th dilution applied to the nose proves perfectly overpowering. There are thousands of persons now-a-days, of both sexes, who, under proper circumstances, can die Pope's aromatic death. Of course they come to life again, modestly expecting the performance to be encored ! Great heaven ! What is the world coming to, when sacred sensibility is worn as a harlequin's dress, to amuse an audience, and monkeys are become the highest objects of emulation to mankind ? Just to that point [remarks an ill-natured friend at my elbow] which so far divests them of common sense, as to make men credulous of infinitesimal agencies. Softly, my dear sir, we must take the world as we find it. Do you not perceive that Hahnemann's system is the offspring of necessity and of nerves ? You would begin your reformation where it ought to end : if you restore mankind to a state of health, bodily and mentally, and blunt by proper education the morbid sensibility of the nerves, homoeopathy will die a natural death ; but destroy at once the little globules, and what becomes of human nature ! Besides all this, Mr. Editor, we profess to be a litde wiser than our fathers. I fancy, Sir, that we require something a little more pretending](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21015648_0017.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
