There is good reason to doubt whether the nitrate of silver has any real efficacy in epilepsy.  It has seemed to cure many cases, but epilepsy is a very uncertain disease, and there is hardly anything which has not been supposed to cure it.  Dr. Copland cites many authorities in its favor, most especially Lombard’s cases.  But De la Berge and Monneret (Comp. de Med.  Paris), 1839, analyze these same cases, eleven in number, and can only draw the inference of a very questionable value in the supposed remedy.  Dr. James Jackson says that relief of epilepsy is not to be attained by any medicine with which he is acquainted, but by diet.  (Letters to a Young Physician, p. 67.) Guy Patin, Dean of the Faculty of Paris, Professor at the Royal College, Author of the Antimonial Martyrology, a wit and a man of sense and learning, who died almost two hundred years ago, had come to the same conclusion, though the chemists of his time boasted of their remedies.  “Did, you ever see a case of epilepsy cured by nitrate of silver?” I said to one of the oldest and most experienced surgeons in this country.  “Never,” was his instant reply.  Dr. Twitchell’s experience was very similar.  How, then, did nitrate of silver come to be given for epilepsy?  Because, as Dr. Martin has so well reminded us, lunatics were considered formerly to be under the special influence of Luna, the moon (which Esquirol, be it observed, utterly denies), and lunar caustic, or nitrate of silver, is a salt of that metal which was called luna from its whiteness, and of course must be in the closest relations with the moon.  It follows beyond all reasonable question that the moon’s metal, silver, and its preparations, must be the specific remedy for moonblasted maniacs and epileptics!

Yet the practitioner who prescribes the nitrate of silver supposes he is guided by the solemn experience of the past, instead of by its idle fancies.  He laughs at those old physicians who placed such confidence in the right hind hoof of an elk as a remedy for the same disease, and leaves the record of his own belief in a treatment quite as fanciful and far more objectionable, written in indelible ink upon a living tablet where he who runs may read it for a whole generation, if nature spares his walking advertisement so long.

NOTE B.—­

The presumption that a man is innocent until he is proved guilty, does not mean that there are no rogues, but lays the onus probandi on the party to which it properly belongs.  So with this proposition.  A noxious agent should never be employed in sickness unless there is ample evidence in the particular case to overcome the general presumption against all such agents, and the evidence is very apt to be defective.