by an ancient colored person in a southern plantation, or washed ashore on the person of a sailor from the South Seas, or invented by a very aged man in New Jersey, who could not read, but had spent his life roaming in the woods, and whose capacity for discovering a “universal panacea,” besides his ignorance and isolation, lay in the fact that his sands of life had nearly run.  It is the supposed secrecy or low origin of the remedy that is its attraction.  The basis of the vast proprietary medicine business is popular ignorance and credulity.  And it needs to be pretty broad to support a traffic of such enormous proportions.

During this generation certain branches of the life-saving and life-prolonging art have made great advances out of empiricism onto the solid ground of scientific knowledge.  Of course I refer to surgery, and to the discovery of the causes and improvement in the treatment of contagious and epidemic diseases.  The general practice has shared in this scientific advance, but it is limited and always will be limited within experimental bounds, by the infinite variations in individual constitutions, and the almost incalculable element of the interference of mental with physical conditions.  When we get an exact science of man, we may expect an exact science of medicine.  How far we are from this, we see when we attempt to make criminal anthropology the basis of criminal legislation.  Man is so complex that if we were to eliminate one of his apparently worse qualities, we might develop others still worse, or throw the whole machine into inefficiency.  By taking away what the phrenologists call combativeness, we could doubtless stop prize-fight, but we might have a springless society.  The only safe way is that taught by horticulture, to feed a fruit-tree generously, so that it has vigor enough to throw off its degenerate tendencies and its enemies, or, as the doctors say in medical practice, bring up the general system.  That is to say, there is more hope for humanity in stimulating the good, than in directly suppressing the evil.  It is on something like this line that the greatest advance has been made in medical practice; I mean in the direction of prevention.  This involves, of course, the exclusion of the evil, that is, of suppressing the causes that produce disease, as well as in cultivating the resistant power of the human system.  In sanitation, diet, and exercise are the great fields of medical enterprise and advance.  I need not say that the physician who, in the case of those under his charge, or who may possibly require his aid, contents himself with waiting for developed disease, is like the soldier in a besieged city who opens the gates and then attempts to repel the invader who has effected a lodgment.  I hope the time will come when the chief practice of the physician will be, first, in oversight of the sanitary condition of his neighborhood, and, next, in preventive attendance on people who think they are well, and are all unconscious of the insidious approach of some concealed malady.