The post hoc ergo propter hoc error:  he got well after taking my medicine; therefore in consequence of taking it.

The false induction from genuine facts of observation, leading to the construction of theories which are then deductively applied in the face of the results of direct observation.  The school of Broussais has furnished us with a good example of this error.

And lastly, the error which Sir Thomas Browne calls giving “a reason of the golden tooth;” that is, assuming a falsehood as a fact, and giving reasons for it, commonly fanciful ones, as is constantly done by that class of incompetent observers who find their “golden tooth” in the fabulous effects of the homoeopathie materia medica,—­which consists of sugar of milk and a nomenclature.

Another portion of the blame rests with the public itself, which insists on being poisoned.  Somebody buys all the quack medicines that build palaces for the mushroom, say rather, the toadstool millionaires.  Who is it?  These people have a constituency of millions.  The popular belief is all but universal that sick persons should feed on noxious substances.  One of our members was called not long since to a man with a terribly sore mouth.  On inquiry he found that the man had picked up a box of unknown pills, in Howard Street, and had proceeded to take them, on general principles, pills being good for people.  They happened to contain mercury, and hence the trouble for which he consulted our associate.

The outside pressure, therefore, is immense upon the physician, tending to force him to active treatment of some kind.  Certain old superstitions, still lingering in the mind of the public, and not yet utterly expelled from that of the profession, are at the bottom of this, or contribute to it largely.  One of the most ancient is, that disease is a malignant agency, or entity, to be driven out of the body by offensive substances, as the smoke of the fish’s heart and liver drove the devil out of Tobit’s bridal chamber, according to the Apochrypha.  Epileptics used to suck the blood from the wounds of dying gladiators. [Plinii Hist.  Mundi. lib. xxviii. c. 4.] The Hon. Robert Boyle’s little book was published some twenty or thirty years before our late President, Dr. Holyoke, was born. [A Collection of Choice and Safe Remedies.  The Fifth Edition, corrected.  London, 1712.  Dr. Holyoke was born in 1728.] In it he recommends, as internal medicines, most of the substances commonly used as fertilizers of the soil.  His “Album Graecum” is best left untranslated, and his “Zebethum Occidentale” is still more transcendentally unmentionable except in a strange dialect.  It sounds odiously to us to hear him recommend for dysentery a powder made from “the sole of an old shoe worn by some man that walks much.”  Perhaps nobody here ever heard of tying a stocking, which had been worn during the day, round the neck at night for a sore throat.  The same idea of virtue in unlovely secretions! [The idea is very ancient.  “Sordes hominis” “Sudore et oleo medicinam facientibus.”—­Plin. xxviii. 4.]