regent doctors of the Faculty of Paris, and then he gives full scope to his satirical vein.  He holds it even as an honour that they do not regard him as impartial.  “The doctors have killed me; what it has pleased them to leave me of life is not worth, in truth, my seeking a milder term....  For these twenty years I have always been worse through the remedies administered to me than through my maladies....  Even were animal magnetism a chimera, it should be tolerated; it would still be useful to mankind, by saving many individuals among them from the incontestable dangers of vulgar medicine....  I wish that medicine, so long accustomed to deceive itself, should still deceive itself now, and that the famous report be nothing but a great error....”  Amidst these singular declarations, there are hundreds of epigrams still more remarkable by their ingenious and lively turn than by their novelty.  If it were true, Gentlemen, that the medical corps had ever tried, knowingly, to impose on the vulgar, to hide the uncertainty of their knowledge, the weakness of their theories, the vagueness of their conceptions, under an obscure and pedantic jargon, the immortal and laughable sarcasms of Moliere would not have been more than an act of strict justice.  In all cases every thing has its day; now, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the most delicate, the most thorny points of doctrine were discussed with an entire good faith, with perfect lucidity, and in a style that placed many members of the faculty in the rank Of our best speakers.  Servan, however, goes beyond the limits of a scientific discussion, when, without any sort of excuse, he accuses his adversaries of being anti-mesmerists through esprit de corps, and, what is worse, through cupidity.

Servan is more in his element when he points out that the present best established medical theories occasioned at their birth prolonged debates; when he reminds us that several medicines have been alternately proscribed and recommended with vehemence:  the author might even have more deeply undermined this side of his subject.  Instead of some unmeaning jokes, why did he not show us, for example, in a neighbouring country, two celebrated physicians, Mead and Woodward, deciding, sword in hand, the quarrel that had arisen between them as to the purgative treatment of a patient?  We should then have heard Woodward, pierced through and through, rolling on the ground, and drenched in blood, say to his adversary with an exhausted voice:  “The blow was harsh, but yet I prefer it to your medicine!”

It is not truth alone that has the privilege of rendering men passionate.  Such was the legitimate result of these retrospective views.  I now ask myself whether, by labouring to put the truth of this aphorism in full light, the passionate advocate of Mesmerism showed proof of ability!