From all this I think it fair to conclude that the catalogues of symptoms attributed in Homoeopathic works to the influence of various drugs upon healthy persons are not entitled to any confidence.

2.  It is necessary to show, in the next place, that medicinal substances are always capable of curing diseases most like their own symptoms.  For facts relating to this question we must look to two sources; the recorded experience of the medical profession in general, and the results of trials made according to Homoeopathic principles, and capable of testing the truth of the doctrine.

No person, that I am aware of, has ever denied that in some cases there exists a resemblance between the effects of a remedy and the symptoms of diseases in which it is beneficial.  This has been recognized, as Hahnemann himself has shown, from the time of Hippocrates.  But according to the records of the medical profession, as they have been hitherto interpreted, this is true of only a very small proportion of useful remedies.  Nor has it ever been considered as an established truth that the efficacy of even these few remedies was in any definite ratio to their power of producing symptoms more or less like those they cured.

Such was the state of opinion when Hahnemann came forward with the proposition that all the cases of successful treatment found in the works of all preceding medical writers were to be ascribed solely to the operation of the Homoeopathic principle, which had effected the cure, although without the physician’s knowledge that this was the real secret.  And strange as it may seem, he was enabled to give such a degree of plausibility to this assertion, that any person not acquainted somewhat with medical literature, not quite familiar, I should rather say, with the relative value of medical evidence, according to the sources whence it is derived, would be almost frightened into the belief, at seeing the pages upon pages of Latin names he has summoned as his witnesses.

It has hitherto been customary, when examining the writings of authors of preceding ages, upon subjects as to which they were less enlightened than ourselves, and which they were very liable to misrepresent, to exercise some little discretion; to discriminate, in some measure, between writers deserving confidence and those not entitled to it.  But there is not the least appearance of any such delicacy on the part of Hahnemann.  A large majority of the names of old authors he cites are wholly unknown to science.  With some of them I have been long acquainted, and I know that their accounts of diseases are no more to be trusted than their contemporary Ambroise Pare’s stories of mermen, and similar absurdities.  But if my judgment is rejected, as being a prejudiced one, I can refer to Cullen, who mentioned three of Hahnemann’s authors in one sentence, as being “not necessarily bad authorities; but certainly such when they delivered very improbable events;” and as this was said