Even if every word he had pretended to take from his old authorities were to be found in them, even if the authority of every one of these authors were beyond question, the looseness with which they are used to prove whatever Hahnemann chooses is beyond the bounds of credibility.  Let me give one instance to illustrate the character of this man’s mind.  Hahnemann asserts, in a note annexed to the 110th paragraph of the “Organon,” that the smell of the rose will cause certain persons to faint.  And he says in the text that substances which produce peculiar effects of this nature on particular constitutions cure the same symptoms in people in general.  Then in another note to the same paragraph he quotes the following fact from one of the last sources one would have looked to for medical information, the Byzantine Historians.

“It was by these means (i.e.  Homoeopathically) that the Princess Eudosia with rose-water restored a person who had fainted!”

Is it possible that a man who is guilty of such pedantic folly as this,—­a man who can see a confirmation of his doctrine in such a recovery as this,—­a recovery which is happening every day, from a breath of air, a drop or two of water, untying a bonnet-string, loosening a stay-lace, and which can hardly help happening, whatever is done,—­is it possible that a man, of whose pages, not here and there one, but hundreds upon hundreds are loaded with such trivialities, is the Newton, the Columbus, the Harvey of the nineteenth century!

The whole process of demonstration he employs is this.  An experiment is instituted with some drug upon one or more healthy persons.  Everything that happens for a number of days or weeks is, as we have seen, set down as an effect of the medicine.  Old volumes are then ransacked promiscuously, and every morbid sensation or change that anybody ever said was produced by the drug in question is added to the list of symptoms.  By one or both of these methods, each of the sixty-four substances enumerated by Hahnemann is shown to produce a very large number of symptoms, the lowest in his scale being ninety-seven, and the highest fourteen hundred and ninety-one.  And having made out this list respecting any drug, a catalogue which, as you may observe in any Homoeopathic manual, contains various symptoms belonging to every organ of the body, what can be easier than to find alleged cures in every medical author which can at once be attributed to the Homoeopathic principle; still more if the grave of extinguished credulity is called upon to give up its dead bones as living witnesses; and worst of all, if the monuments of the past are to be mutilated in favor of “the sole law of Nature in therapeutics”?

There are a few familiar facts of which great use has been made as an entering wedge for the Homoeopathic doctrine.  They have been suffered to pass current so long that it is time they should be nailed to the counter, a little operation which I undertake, with perfect cheerfulness, to perform for them.