We have not taken any part in the controversy now raging between the Allopathists and Homoeopathists; but we think it our duty to point out a signal benefit which appears to have resulted from it.  Allopathy means simply ‘another suffering,’ and Homoeopathy ‘the same suffering;’ from which the ingenious may conclude, that our regular doctors pretend to cure diseases by inducing other diseases, and the new school by inducing symptoms identical with those of the existing disease.  But there is another difference between the schools.  The one gives the medicine boldly by the grain, the other cautiously by the millionth part of a grain.  Both sometimes fail; both sometimes cure.  Which is right?

We cannot pretend to answer the question; but in practice we hold with the regular doctors.  We do this because we are used to it.  We may be said to have been born with their silver spoon in our mouths; and we should be terrified if the ghost of a grain went in instead.  We have done our duty from our youth up by pills, boluses, and draughts:  we can lay our hand, with a clear conscience, on our stomach, and avouch that fact.  We have ever held our doctor in too much reverence to disobey him; and we revere him more and more every day, since we find him grappling closer and closer with the Homoeopathists, and meeting them manfully on their own ground.  ‘We will not,’ says he, ’give in to the absurdity of attempting to counteract a disease by a medicine that produces the same disease; but something good may be learned from your infinitesimal system.  To that system you owe the fact that you are now at large:  if you had given doses like ours of such medicines, you would have been in the hands of the turnkey or the mad-doctor long ago.  Your cures have been effected by your giving so little as not to interrupt nature in any appreciable manner.  But we will improve upon your placebos.  If an infinitesimal dose is good, no dose at all is better—­and, except in special cases, that shall henceforward be our system!’

Our readers may think this a jest; but it is actually the point at which, on the part of the Allopathists, the controversy has arrived.  A very intelligent and intelligible paper by Dr C. Radclyffe Hall, of Torquay, has appeared in the Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal, in which the subject is treated in a pleasant and profitable way.  He is aware of the difficulty there will be in introducing the new system—­of the surprised stare with which the patient will regard the doctor ’doing nothing;’ and as confidence is an important part of the cure, the rule cannot be made absolute.  ’But as often as it can be adopted it should.  By degrees, the doctrine will work its way, that medical attendants are required to survey, superintend, and direct disease, to watch lest harm accrue unnoticed, to employ active remedies when required, or not to interfere at all, as seems to their own judgment best.  Every case of successful treatment without medicines will assist to indoctrinate the public with this view.  By learning how much nature can do without medicines, people will be able to perceive more correctly how much medicines, when they are necessary, can assist nature.’