156 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



George Eliot, in " Middlemarch," alludes to St. John Long and bis 

 quackeries. 



Homoeopathy is another form of quackery to which I must shortly 

 allude. It originated in 1796, with Hahnemann, a German physician. 

 Hahnemann laid down, as necessary to his system, three great founda- 

 tion truths : 



1. Similia similibus curantur. This means that diseases are to 

 be cured by the administration of substances which, in healthy indi- 

 viduals, produce the same symptoms or group of symptoms as the dis- 

 ease itself manifests. This idea was not original with Hahnemann. 

 Hippocrates distinctly enunciates it, and since then it has been held 

 by many physicians and others, including Paracelsus, who was the 

 inspirer of Hahnemann. 



2. That it is necessary to give remedies in infinitesimal doses. Sub- 

 stances which are given by the regular school in doses of four to five 

 grains, homoeopaths should give in quantities of two decillionths of a 

 grain and less. Hahnemann says, in his " Organon": "But, if the pa- 

 tient is very sensitive, it will be sufficient to let him smell once of a 

 vial containing a globule of sugar the size of a mustard-seed ; after the 

 patient has smelled it, the vial is to be recorked, and will thus serve for 

 years without its medical virtues being perceptibly impaired." This 

 second " great truth " was, as has been lately pointed out by Dr. 

 Holmes, adopted from Van Helmont, a physician who flourished in 

 the early part of the seventeenth century. He denied the existence of 

 the four elements, and held up to ridicule the practice of letting blood 

 for the cure of disease. 



Van Helmont, in his " Ortus Medicinae," describes a method of 

 treatment made use of by one Butler, an Irishman, who was formerly 

 physician to James I, and at that time was confined in prison in 

 Belgium. According to Van Helmont, Butler performed wonderful 

 cures with a pebble he had in his possession. He dipped this pebble 

 quickly into a teaspoonf ul of olive-oil, poured this " magnetized oil " 

 into a large vessel of oil, and directed the patient to take one drop 

 occasionally. When one drop was put on the head of an old woman 

 suffering from hemicrania, the pain instantly disappeared. An abbess 

 was relieved of loss of power in her right arm by merely touching her 

 tongue to the pebble. No doubt reading this book first suggested in- 

 finitesimal doses to Hahnemann. 



Hahnemann's " third dogma or truth " was, that seven eighths of 

 all chronic diseases are produced by psora, or itch. " This psora," says 

 Hahnemann, " is the sole, true, and fundamental cause that produces 

 all the other countless forms of disease, which go under the names of 

 hysteria, hypochondriasis, debility, insanity, melancholy, idiocy, epi- 

 lepsy, cancer, gout, paralysis," etc., etc. (I shall not complete the list). 

 He tells the reader in a foot-note that it took him twelve years to trace 

 out the source of all these diseases. This third dogma was original 



