MEDICAL QUACKS AXD QUACKERIES. 159 



charge of homoeopathic physicians ; quite recently they have been re- 

 lieved from further attendance by the managers, because of the ex- 

 travagant expenditure of money for drugs. Among the items are 

 three pounds of salicylic acid and four thousand grains of quinine. 



In Ontario, up to ten years ago, homoeopaths were yearly regis- 

 tered by scores ; since then they have to pass through the same 

 courses and examinations as the regular students, in all but thera- 

 peutics and pharmacy. The consequence is, that in ten years there 

 have only been two or three applications for examinations as homoeo- 

 paths. Homoeopathy, being a system utterly devoid of any scientific 

 foundation, is now dying a natural death. 



It is difficult to give the exact reason or reasons why quackery is 

 so prevalent. The causes are very various and obscure. Southey 

 says : " Man is a dupable animal ; quacks in medicine, quacks in reli- 

 gion, and quacks in politics know this, and act upon that knowledge. 

 There is scarcely any one who may not, like a trout, be taken by 

 tickling." It is extraordinary what a hold the mystic and marvelous 

 still have on many people ; there seems to be in almost every one a 

 vein of credulity and superstition against which argument is useless. 

 The disposition to be humbugged preponderates in human nature over 

 reason and common sense. Education, at least the education of the 

 day, apparently has no influence in depriving people of this quality. 

 Men of education are the very ones who have been, and are now, 

 duped by clever quacks. A man may be an able politician, distin- 

 guished in literature, of great shrewdness in the ordinary business of 

 life, and yet believe in spiritualism, homoeopathy, Perkinism, and tar- 

 water. When he is ill he will probably, after taking in vain the vari- 

 ous much vaunted and advertised panaceas, call in some quack who 

 promises a cure in a certain time and in some uncommon manner. 



Bishop Berkeley is an example of a man of great attainments, 

 whose mind was obscured by quackery. His tar-water he considered 

 an infallible remedy for all ailments, and wrote a book describing its 

 universal efficacy in curing disease. Dr. O. W. Holmes says: "He 

 might have lived longer, but his fatal illness was so sudden that there 

 was no time to stir up a quart of the panacea. He was a very illus- 

 trious man, but he held two very odd opinions, that tar-water was 

 everything, and that the whole material universe was nothing (" Cur- 

 rents and Counter-Currents," p. 72). Alfred Russel Wallace,* the emi- 



* Mr. Wallace, in his book on " Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," holds that the 

 theory of a future existence as taught by spiritualists is the " only one yet given to the 

 world that can at all commend itself to the modern philosophical mind," and in the spirit- 

 ual world the law of " progression of the fittest " takes the place of the grand law of the 

 " survival of the fittest " in the material world. He also holds that witches were what 

 are now called " mediums." Owing to the number of witches destroyed for several cen- 

 turies, the production of spiritual phenomena became impossible, which accounts for 

 spiritualism being of comparatively recent origin. 



