“And such is contemporary science.  Everybody discovers a new or forgotten disease, and trumpets a forgotten or a new remedy, and nobody knows a thing!  And then, too, what good does it do one not to be hopelessly ignorant since there is so much sophistication going on in pharmacy that no physician can be sure of having his prescriptions filled to the letter?  One example among many:  at present, sirup of white poppy, the diacodia of the old Codex, does not exist.  It is manufactured with laudanum and sirup of sugar, as if they were the same thing!

“We have got so we no longer dose substances but prescribe ready-made remedies and use those surprising specifics which fill up the fourth pages of the journals.  It’s a compromise medicine, a democratic medicine, one cure for all cases.  It’s scandalous, it’s silly.

“No, there is no use in talking.  The old therapeutics based on experience was better than this.  At least it know that remedies ingested in pill, powder, or bolus form were treacherous, so it prescribed them only in the liquid state.  Now, too, every physician specializes.  The oculists see only the eyes, and, to cure them, quite calmly poison the body.  With their pilocarpine they have ruined the health of how many people for ever!  Others treat cutaneous affections.  They drive an eczema inward on an old man who as soon as he is ‘cured’ becomes childish or dangerous.  There is no more solidarity.  Allegiance to one party means hostility to all others.  Its a mess.  Now my honourable confreres are stumbling around, taking a fancy to medicaments which they don’t even know how to use.  Take antipyrine, for example.  It is one of the very few really active products that the chemists have found in a long time.  Well, where is the doctor who knows that, applied in a compress with iodide and cold Bondonneau spring water, antipyrine combats the supposedly incurable ailment, cancer?  And if that seems incredible, it is true, nevertheless.”

“Honestly,” said Durtal, “you believe that the old-time doctors came nearer healing?”

“Yes, because, miraculously, they know the effects of certain invariable remedies prepared without fraud.  Of course it is self-evident that when old Pare eulogized ‘sack medicine’ and ordered his patients to carry pulverized medicaments in a little sack whose form varied according to the organ to be healed, assuming the form of a cap for the head, of a bagpipe for the stomach, of an ox tongue for the spleen, he probably did not obtain very signal results.  His claim to have cured gastralgia by appositions of powder of red rose, coral and mastic, wormwood and mint, aniseed and nutmeg, is certainly not to be borne out, but he also had other systems, and often he cured, because he possessed the science of simples, which is now lost.