M. Andral, the “eminent and very enlightened allopathist” of the “Homoeopathic Examiner,” made the following statement in March, 1835, to the Academy of Medicine:  “I have submitted this doctrine to experiment; I can reckon at this time from one hundred and thirty to one hundred and forty cases, recorded with perfect fairness, in a great hospital, under the eye of numerous witnesses; to avoid every objection—­I obtained my remedies of M. Guibourt, who keeps a Homoeopathic pharmacy, and whose strict exactness is well known; the regimen has been scrupulously observed, and I obtained from the sisters attached to the hospital a special regimen, such as Hahnemann orders.  I was told, however, some months since, that I had not been faithful to all the rules of the doctrine.  I therefore took the trouble to begin again; I have studied the practice of the Parisian Homoeopathists, as I had studied their books, and I became convinced that they treated their patients as I had treated mine, and I affirm that I have been as rigorously exact in the treatment as any other person.”

And he expressly asserts the entire nullity of the influence of all the Homoeopathic remedies tried by him in modifying, so far as he could observe, the progress or termination of diseases.  It deserves notice that he experimented with the most boasted substances,—­cinchona, aconite, mercury, bryonia, belladonna.  Aconite, for instance, he says he administered in more than forty cases of that collection of feverish symptoms in which it exerts so much power, according to Hahnemann, and in not one of them did it have the slightest influence, the pulse and heat remaining as before.

These statements look pretty honest, and would seem hard to be explained away, but it is calmly said that he “did not know enough of the method to select the remedies with any tolerable precision.” ["Homoeopathic Examiner, vol. i. p. 22.]

“Nothing is left to the caprice of the physician.” (In a word, instead of being dependent upon blind chance, that there is an infallible law, guided by which; the physician must select the proper remedies.’) [’Ibid.,’ in a notice of Menzel’s paper.] Who are they that practice Homoeopathy, and say this of a man with the Materia Medica of Hahnemann lying before him?  Who are they that send these same globules, on which he experimented, accompanied by a little book, into families, whose members are thought competent to employ them, when they deny any such capacity to a man whose life has been passed at the bedside of patients, the most prominent teacher in the first Medical Faculty in the world, the consulting physician of the King of France, and one of the most renowned practical writers, not merely of his nation, but of his age?  I leave the quibbles by which such persons would try to creep out from under the crushing weight of these conclusions to the unfortunates who suppose that a reply is equivalent to an answer.