Such is the pretended science of Homoeopathy, to which you are asked to trust your lives and the lives of those dearest to you.  A mingled mass of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel erudition, of imbecile credulity, and of artful misrepresentation, too often mingled in practice, if we may trust the authority of its founder, with heartless and shameless imposition.  Because it is suffered so often to appeal unanswered to the public, because it has its journals, its patrons, its apostles, some are weak enough to suppose it can escape the inevitable doom of utter disgrace and oblivion.  Not many years can pass away before the same curiosity excited by one of Perkins’s Tractors will be awakened at the sight of one of the Infinitesimal Globules.  If it should claim a longer existence, it can only be by falling into the hands of the sordid wretches who wring their bread from the cold grasp of disease and death in the hovels of ignorant poverty.

As one humble member of a profession which for more than two thousand years has devoted itself to the pursuit of the best earthly interests of mankind, always assailed and insulted from without by such as are ignorant of its infinite perplexities and labors, always striving in unequal contest with the hundred-armed giant who walks in the noonday, and sleeps not in the midnight, yet still toiling, not merely for itself and the present moment, but for the race and the future, I have lifted my voice against this lifeless delusion, rolling its shapeless bulk into the path of a noble science it is too weak to strike, or to injure.

THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF PUERPERAL FEVER

Printed in 1843; reprinted with additions, 1855.

The point at issue.

THE AFFIRMATIVE.

“The disease known as Puerperal Fever is so far contagious as to be frequently carried from patient to patient by physicians and nurses.”  O. W. Holmes, 1843.

THE NEGATIVE.

“The result of the whole discussion will, I trust, serve, not only to exalt your views of the value and dignity of our profession, but to divest your minds of the overpowering dread that you can ever become, especially to woman, under the extremely interesting circumstances of gestation and parturition, the minister of evil; that you can ever convey, in any possible manner, a horrible virus, so destructive in its effects, and so mysterious in its operations as that attributed to puerperal fever.”—­Professor Hodge, 1852.

“I prefer to attribute them to accident, or Providence, of which I can form a conception, rather than to a contagion of which I cannot form any clear idea, at least as to this particular malady.”—­Professor Meigs, 1852.

" . . . in the propagation of which they have no more to do, than with the propagation of cholera from Jessore to San Francisco, and from Mauritius to St. Petersburg.”—­Professor Meigs, 1854.