had established them on an incontrovertible basis. Or perhaps some zealous partizan of this newest of the neologies, refers him to the vast resources which modern discoveries have developed in nature-to the wondrous power of steam under the ruling hand of art to the electric telegraph, which with wings of light annihilates space, bringing the most remote places as it were to the same point.

It is as if we were required to believe, that because steam has been successfully applied to locomotion on land and sea, it will also be of service in navigating the air-or because that subtle agent magnetism produces motion, that it must be identi cal with or a fit substitute for the vital principle.

Or do you presume to doubt the efficacy of nothing infinitesimally diluted, in the cure of disease-straightway up starts an apostle of Homœopathy to confront with you the shades of the great Harvey, or the greater Jenner, whose discoveries of the circulation of the blood, and the prophylactic capacity of vaccination, were for a time held in little esteem, only to be in after years encircled with a brighter halo, and an ever-increasing lustre. Nor are these the only names they quote. They press into service Galileo with his wondrous tube, into which the Paduan professor refused to look; Sydenham, who was counted a murderer; Aristotle and Descartes, whose books were burnt; Linnæus and Buffon, who were charged with impiety and infidelity, and Ambrose Paré who was "hooted at for introducing the ligature in cases of amputation, as a substitute for boiling pitch." Thus, the persecutions which truth has experienced, are adroitly used to protect error, however gross,—as if on the ground that imperfect and partially enlightened reason has failed at first to receive certain truths, therefore, if a dogma revolts reason, it must be true. Oh! miserable perversion of faculties given for high ends! Oh! human degradation below the level of unreasoning brutes!

In scrutinizing a system of medicine, it is necessary first to consider its principles, as laid down in the books which are its acknowledged exponents, and then the results of those principles as applied in practice. And as Hahnemann's Organon is

the bible of the new creed, containing the chief attempt at a philosophical explanation of its articles, no apology is demanded if we make it our text-book on this occasion, endeavouring to exhibit some of the fallacies and inconsistencies with which it abounds. The author of this treatise, Samuel Hahnemann, was born 1755, at Meissen, in Saxony. While at the University of Leipsic, where he studied with distinction, he supported himself by translating English medical books, one of which (Cullen's First Lines) he says, indirectly, begot in his head the Homœopathic theory. For being dissatisfied with Cullen's solution of the antipyretic virtues of bark, he set about discovering them by a series of experiments upon himself; in the prosecution of which, he asserts that the medicine produced an ague fit. He immediately suspected that its curative properties depended on this singular peculiarity; and the suspicion became conviction when he detected, as he thought, a similar peculiarity connected with other medicinal agents, viz: that they were able to excite symptoms resembling those of the diseases in which they were of use. For example, he states that belladonna will produce an efflorescence and sore throat, like those of scarlet fever, for which he thinks it a specific, curative, and prophylactic. So, too, that sulphur will produce an eruption similar to itch, for which it is a renowned remedy.

Having settled down on his principle, he began to explore all the books to which he had access, for cases wherewith to confirm it, and render it fit to present to the world. However questionable the authority or shape of a story, or however completely opposite cases might neutralize it, mattered not a straw. If it could be tortured into a homeopathic aspect, he compelled it to do duty as a foundation stone for his immortal pyramid. So was the Organon built.

Its name marks the ambitious nature of the performance, and the self-conceit of its author. Bacon's Organon dispelled the obscurity of the dark ages, and swept away the hypothetical cobwebs and a priori assumptions of Aristotle, substituting in their stead the certainties of induction. In like manner, Hahnemann's Organon claims to have entered the chaos of con

flicting medical opinions, reduced anarchy to order, and derived from the confused facts of the Hippocratic system, hoary with the snows of twenty-five centuries, the sole law which governs them. The author declares Allœopathy and Antipathy, the former producing different, the latter opposite symptoms to those of disease, to be merely palliative—to have no power of effecting a radical cure. He arrogates to his principle, the credit of the cures wrought apparently by Allœopathy. He depreciates the efforts of nature, as miserable futilities, and for the most part sections of Alloeopathy. For instance, p. 104, he says, "Neither the efforts of nature, nor the skill of the physician, have ever been able to cure disease by a dissimilar morbific power, whatever energy the latter may have possessed." Thus he very much deprecates the crises and critical evacuations of nature, and which Allœopathy imitates by venesection, diuretics, emetics, and purgatives. Elsewhere, with his ordinary inconsistency, he admits that nature does cure by these allœopathic means, though with much inconvenience and danger to the patient.

A main dogma of Homœopathy, and which we have quoted at the head of this article is, "that diseases are dynamic aberrations, which our spiritual existence undergoes in its mode of feeling and acting-that is to say IMмmaterial changes in the state of health." Hahnemann is clearly a solidist, setting at nought the famous humoral pathology. Elsewhere he says, "diseases are not mechanical or chemical changes of the matter of the body," &c.*

In intimate relation with this is the notion, that the ensemble of the symptoms constitutes a disease. Says the Organon," the ensemble of the symptoms is the principal and sole object that a physician ought to have in view in every case of disease—the power of his art is to be directed against that alone, in order to cure and transform it into health." Again, "I cannot therefore comprehend how it was possible for physicians, without heeding the symptoms, or taking them as a guide in the treatment, to imagine that they ought to search the interior of the human economy, and that they could there alone discover that which

was to be cured in disease. I cannot conceive how they could entertain so ridiculous a pretension, as that of being able to discover the internal invisible change that had taken place, and restore the same to the order of its normal condition, by the aid of medicine."* And the man who "could not conceive" a thing which modern pathological science has illuminated with her concentrated light, and made plain to the merest tyro-is elevated into a demi-god, whom we weak mortals, in the year of grace 1847, are commanded to worship.

Another cardinal principle in Homœopathy, and the one which Hahnemann applies to account for the curative action of medicines, is John Hunter's fancy, that two similar diseases cannot co-exist, but that the stronger will expel the weaker. In this connection he assumes that drug diseases make a more powerful impression on the nervous system than spontaneous diseases, and that they rouse nature under the operation of the law just enunciated, to react and expel the latter, after which their own action soon subsides. It is useless to quote his words. But beautiful as Hahnemann thought his theory of re-action, and much as he plumed himself on it, a portion of his followers reject it. Sampson, an English writer, taxes it with being" contradictory, and based on numerous assumptions." Nothing remarkable in that, surely, or out of the regular homœopathic track. Had it been otherwise, we might justly have doubted its paternity. He remarks, very properly, that "we have no sufficient proof of the greater strength of the medicinal disease as compared with natural diseases; nor that the human system cannot suffer from two like diseases at the same time. And why, too, should not the vital power, which was sufficient to throw off the severer medicinal disease, be sufficient to throw off the natural and milder form." He offers then a theory of his own, to the effect, that the symptoms of disturbance are indications which nature gives as to which organs are laboring and in a state of over action, so that when we observe this over action we may administer the appropriate stimulus (homœopathic) of that organ, and thus by enabling it to perform what it is ineffectually endeavouring to per†Idem p. 100

*p. 80, Organon.

form, cause the existing evil to be thrown off and with it all disturbance to which it had given rise.*

By the way (to illustrate how humbugs hang together, and how easy, like that of Avernus, is the descent down the whole string,) M. B. Sampson the author of the above theory, (extracted from his ingenious and zealous work on Homœopathy,) is also the author of a work on capital punishment, in which he advocates its abolition and propounds the startling doctrine that crime is owing to a malformation of the criminal's head, which he did not create, and that he is therefore not a responsible agent-Vive la humbug! We venture to assert that Sampson, not so strong in the head as his namesake in the arms, will not succeed in pulling down the edifice of society, but that he would be found on enquiry a devout believer in Mesmerism, Hydropathy, Fourierism, and a dozen other isms and ys.

To return. Sampson and Hahnemann differ in their estimate of natural indications. Sampson would have us implicitly obey them, while Hahnemann persists that they are the blind strugglings of "an unintelligent vital power." Reconcile the discrepancy who will. The egg is not worth the salt.

But Hahnemann, that pink of Inconsistency, is bound to be so here. Accordingly, he gravely and emphatically quotes certain hatural cures which he considers homoeopathic, and thus boasts of the suffrage of an agent which when it operates allœopathically is not far removed from idiocy.†

Another prominent doctrine of Homœopathy relates to chronic diseases-Hahnemann derives them all from Syphilis, Sycosis and Psora-especially the last. With regard to the action of syphilis upon the animal economy, his views are not very different from those generally entertained. His treatment of chancres is of course highly reprehensible, rejecting as he does the application of caustic, and the internal exhibition of mercury in appreciable doses. By Sycosis he means venereal gonhorrhoea, and the vegetations that spring from it. He holds that +Organon, p. 101 et sequent

*Sampson on Homœopathy, p. 212.

Idem, p. 122.