“After stooping some time, sense of painful weight about the head upon resuming the erect posture.”

“An itching, tickling sensation at the outer edge of the palm of the left hand, which obliges the person to scratch.”  The medicine was acetate of lime, and as the action of the globule taken is said to last twenty-eight days, you may judge how many such symptoms as the last might be supposed to happen.

Among the symptoms attributed to muriatic acid are these:  a catarrh, sighing, pimples; “after having written a long time with the back a little bent over, violent pain in the back and shoulder-blades, as if from a strain,”—­“dreams which are not remembered,—­disposition to mental dejection,—­wakefulness before and after midnight.”

I might extend this catalogue almost indefinitely.  I have not cited these specimens with any view to exciting a sense of the ridiculous, which many others of those mentioned would not fail to do, but to show that the common accidents of sensation, the little bodily inconveniences to which all of us are subject, are seriously and systematically ascribed to whatever medicine may have been exhibited, even in the minute doses I have mentioned, whole days or weeks previously.

To these are added all the symptoms ever said by anybody, whether deserving confidence or not, as I shall hereafter illustrate, to be produced by the substance in question.

The effects of sixty-four medicinal substances, ascertained by one or both of these methods, are enumerated in the Materia Medica of Hahnemann, which may be considered as the basis of practical Homoeopathy.  In the Manual of Jahr, which is the common guide, so far as I know, of those who practise Homoeopathy in these regions, two hundred remedies are enumerated, many of which, however, have never been employed in practice.  In at least one edition there were no means of distinguishing those which had been tried upon the sick from the others.  It is true that marks have been added in the edition employed here, which serve to distinguish them; but what are we to think of a standard practical author on Materia Medica, who at one time omits to designate the proper doses of his remedies, and at another to let us have any means of knowing whether a remedy has ever been tried or not, while he is recommending its employment in the most critical and threatening diseases?

I think that, from what I have shown of the character of Hahnemann’s experiments, it would be a satisfaction to any candid inquirer to know whether other persons, to whose assertions he could look with confidence, confirm these pretended facts.  Now there are many individuals, long and well known to the scientific world, who have tried these experiments upon healthy subjects, and utterly deny that their effects have at all corresponded to Hahnemann’s assertions.