Many of the older books are full of absurd nostrums.  A century ago, Huxham gave messes to his patients containing more than four hundred ingredients.  Remedies were ordered that must have been suggested by the imagination; things odious, abominable, unmentionable; flesh of vipers, powder of dead men’s bones, and other horrors, best mused in expressive silence.  Go to the little book of Robert Boyle,—­wise man, philosopher, revered of cures for the most formidable diseases, many of them of this fantastic character, that disease should seem to have been a thing that one could turn off at will, like gas or water in our houses.  Only there were rather too many specifics in those days.  For if one has “an excellent approved remedy” that never fails, it seems unnecessary to print a list of twenty others for the same purpose.  This is wanton excess; it is gilding the golden pill, and throwing fresh perfume on the Mistura Assafoetidae.

As the observation of nature has extended, and as mankind have approached the state of only semi-barbarism in which they now exist, there has been an improvement.  The materia medica has been weeded; much that was worthless and revolting has been thrown overboard; simplicity has been introduced into prescriptions; and the whole business of drugging the sick has undergone a most salutary reform.  The great fact has been practically recognized, that the movements of life in disease obey laws which, under the circumstances, are on the whole salutary, and only require a limited and occasional interference by any special disturbing agents.  The list of specifics has been reduced to a very brief catalogue, and the delusion which had exaggerated the power of drugging for so many generations has been tempered down by sound and systematic observation.

Homoeopathy came, and with one harlequin bound leaped out of its century backwards into the region of quagmires and fogs and mirages, from which true medical science was painfully emerging.  All the trumpery of exploded pharmacopoeias was revived under new names.  Even the domain of the loathsome has been recently invaded, and simpletons are told in the book before us to swallow serpents’ poison; nay, it is said that the pediculis capitis is actually prescribed in infusion,—­hunted down in his capillary forest, and transferred to the digestive organs of those he once fed upon.

It falsely alleged one axiom as the basis of existing medical practice, namely, Contraria contrarues curantur,—­“Contraries are cured by contraries.”  No such principle was ever acted upon, exclusively, as the basis of medical practice.  The man who does not admit it as one of the principles of practice would, on medical principles, refuse a drop of cold water to cool the tongue of Dives in fiery torments.  The only unconditional principle ever recognized by medical science has been, that diseases are to be treated by the remedies that experience shows to be useful.  The universal use of both cold and hot external and internal remedies in various inflammatory states puts the garrote at once on the babbling throat of the senseless assertion of the homaeopathists, and stultifies for all time the nickname “allopathy.”