If I am right in maintaining that the presumption is always against the use of noxious agents in disease, and if any whom I might influence should adopt this as a principle of practice, they will often find themselves embarrassed by the imperative demand of patients and their friends for such agents where a case is not made out against this standing presumption.  I must be permitted to say, that I think the French, a not wholly uncivilized people, are in advance of the English and ourselves in the art of prescribing for the sick without hurting them.  And I do confess that I think their varied ptisans and syrups are as much preferable to the mineral regimen of bug-poison and ratsbane, so long in favor on the other side of the Channel, as their art of preparing food for the table to the rude cookery of those hard-feeding and much-dosing islanders.  We want a reorganized cuisine of invalidism perhaps as much as the culinary, reform, for which our lyceum lecturers, and others who live much at hotels and taverns, are so urgent.  Will you think I am disrespectful if I ask whether, even in Massachusetts, a dose of calomel is not sometimes given by a physician on the same principle as that upon which a landlord occasionally prescribes bacon and eggs,—­because he cannot think of anything else quite so handy?  I leave my suggestion of borrowing a hint from French practice to your mature consideration.

I may, however, call your attention, briefly, to the singular fact, that English and American practitioners are apt to accuse French medical practice of inertness, and French surgical practice of unnecessary activity.  Thus, Dr. Bostock considers French medical treatment, with certain exceptions, as “decidedly less effective” than that of his own country.  Mr. S. Cooper, again, defends the simple British practice of procuring union by the first intention against the attacks of M. Roux and Baron Larrey. [Cooper’s Surg.  Diet. art.  “Wounds.”  Yet Mr. John Bell gives the French surgeons credit for introducing this doctrine of adhesion, and accuses O’Halloran of “rudeness and ignorance,” and “bold, uncivil language,” in disputing their teaching.  Princ. of Surgery, vol. i. p. 42.  Mr. Hunter succeeded at last in naturalizing the doctrine and practice, but even he had to struggle against the perpetual jealousy of rivals, and died at length assassinated by an insult.] We have often heard similar opinions maintained by our own countrymen.  While Anglo-American criticism blows hot or cold on the two departments of French practice, it is not, I hope, indecent to question whether all the wisdom is necessarily with us in both cases.