LITERARY NOTICES.

Brief Expositions of Rational Medicine; To which is prefixed The Paradise of Doctors, a Fable.  By JACOB BIGELOW, M.D., Late President of the Massachusetts Medical Society, Physician of the Massachusetts General Hospital, etc.  Boston:  Phillips, Sampson, and Company, 13, Winter Street. 1858.

Two doctrines, each containing a fraction of truth, have lain soaking in the mind of our free-and-easy community so long, that what strength they had is well-nigh got out of them.

Doctrine the first is, that a man who has devoted himself to a particular calling is to be considered necessarily ignorant thereof, —­and that certain babes and sucklings in that particular branch of knowledge, and all others, are to be accepted as the true oracles with regard to its mysteries.  Doctrine the second is, that every new theory accepted by any number of persons has some important truth at the bottom of it.

The first of these doctrines has its real meaning.  It is true that there may be a common feeling of justice in the minds of ignorant people which shall override the decisions of a learned Chief Justice.  It is true that a man may brutalize himself by a contemplation of theological cruelties, until decent parents are ashamed to have their children listen to his libels on the Father of All.  It is true that a physician may become such a drug-peddling routinist, that sensible mothers see through him, and know enough to throw his trash out of the window as soon as he turns his back.

The second doctrine has its real meaning.  Until men turn into beasts, they must have some arguments addressed to their reason before they will believe, and still more before they will act.  Spiritualism has its significance, as an appeal from the gross materialism and heathen ideas of another life so commonly entertained.  Mormonism has its logic, as an appeal from the enforced celibacy of one sex, and to the Oriental Abrahamic instincts of the other.  Homoeopathy has its fraction of sanity, as a protest against that odious tendency of physicians to give nauseous stuff to people because they are ailing, which sickened the pages of old pharmacopoeias with powders of earthworms and album Graecum, and even now makes illness terrible where it reigns unrebuked.

Swallow these two paragraphs of concession as the infusion drawn from those two doctrines laid down at starting, and throw away the effete axioms as fit only for old women to coddle and drench themselves withal.  Having done this, the reader is ready for the book the title of which we have prefixed.