CORRESP ONDENCE. 



845 



CORRESPONDENCE. 



BLACK REPLIES TO OSWALD. 



Mes&rs. Editors : 



DR. F. L. OSWALD'S answer in your 

 last issue to my criticism demands 

 a reply, for the purpose of elucidating who 

 is in the right on questions closely apper- 

 taining to every one's welfare. 



His personal allusions may be at once 

 thrust aside as irrelevant. The reading 

 public can not be interested in me, but pre- 

 sumably in my statements, whether they are 

 true or false not whether I am assuming, 

 which I am not, to represent some forty 

 thousand physicians of the so-called ortho- 

 dox school. 



Dr. Oswald antagonizes my statement 

 that the tendency to dyspepsia is an in- 

 herited one, by a glittering generality. Can 

 I " deny that from the moment of birth mill- 

 ions of infants are overfed and drug-poi- 

 soned " ? Well, what of the millions that are 

 not ? Are they the ones who do not show 

 any such tendency, despite the fact that some 

 of their progenitors do ? Let him produce 

 his proofs, or hold his peace. Such an an- 

 swer to overthrow an established doctrine, 

 unless verification be produced of causal re- 

 lation between the antecedems and conse- 

 quents, is not worth the paper on which it is 

 written. To illustrate : I can with equal 

 plausibility deny that insanity is hereditary 

 by the assumption that it arises de novo from 

 a source whose reality Dr. Oswald can not 

 deny, that millions of children are from 

 the moment of birth overfed and then over- 

 taxed by brain- work at school ; or, in the 

 example of consumption, that heredity has 

 nothing to do with it, for are not millions 

 overfed and lung-poisoned by impure air 

 from the moment of birth ? Such is the 

 style of sophomoric inanity which assumes 

 to overthrow the doctrine established by 

 vital statistics and by the observation of all 

 competent men, that all organic defects, 

 whether inherited or slowly acquired, are 

 transmissible qualities. 



Dr. Oswald answers to his inconsistency 

 of cleansing his outside skin with soap 

 and water, and allowing his much-abused 

 and betimes very filthy inside one the 

 alimentary mucous membrane to cleanse 

 itself, by the inquiry, " Does Nature ever 

 protest against soap and water ? " She 

 does, as every practical physician well knows. 

 Turn to any standard author on skin-dis- 

 eases, and the use of any kind of soap will 

 be found to be prohibited in some cases, es- 

 pecially in those whose cuticles, like homoe- 

 opathic remedies, are far too tenuous. The 

 striking benefit of a cleansing cathartic 



which men and women often feel, after hav- 

 ing suffered for days from a dead, heavy, 

 aching languor, is such a common realiza- 

 tion that Dr. Oswald may save himself the 

 trouble of elaborating a specious theory to 

 prove them deluded, for facts are such 

 stubborn things. 



And this brings me to the silly slang 

 characteristic of all kinds of quacks their 

 never-ending harping about " poison-drugs." 

 It is their shibboleth, the great hope of gain 

 to themselves by acting on the fears of the 

 afflicted. What is a poison ? It is any sub- 

 stance taken into the body which with more 

 or less rapidity tends to destroy life. This 

 embraces every substance except foods, air, 

 and drink from the clay eaten by the Bra- 

 zilian, to the alcohol in the beer of the 

 Teuton. Do a few grains of santonine, to 

 expel lumbricoides from the bowels, tend to 

 destroy life or to preserve it ? Do a few 

 ounces of alcohol, to tide failing vital power 

 over a dangerous depression, tend to destroy 

 life or to preserve it ? Do a few doses of 

 quinine, to arrest an ague-chill, tend to de- 

 stroy life or to preserve it ? Or, to put the 

 query in another form, Do the effects of 

 the santonine, the alcohol, and the quinine, 

 tend to aggravate or to render the disor- 

 ders for which they are given more danger- 

 ous ? Even a Dr. Oswald, or a Dio Lewis, 

 who contradicts the almost universal expe- 

 rience that they tend to preserve life instead 

 of destroying it (that is, do not act as poi- 

 sons), may be asked for the evidence to show 

 that nearly all the world are wrong, and they 

 only are right. If a few doses of quinine 

 could produce profound and dangerous vital 

 disturbances at all approaching those of 

 the fever for which the medicine is given, 

 then Dr. Oswald might have at least one 

 string to his harp. If, after taking fifteen 

 grains of quinine, he was seized with a se- 

 vere chill with burning fever, with aching 

 misery in every bone and nerve of his body 

 with vomiting, with protracted debility 

 and wasting of the body, and, after a few 

 doses more, with a congestive chill, ending 

 life in a few hours, then Dr. Oswald might 

 with good reason take up the battle-cry of 

 quackery, " Poison ! poison ! " Until Dr. 

 Oswald proves that the quinine does not 

 preserve from these very dangers to health 

 and life, leaving no ill effects except those 

 that belong to the disease his ipse dixit 

 about drug-poisoning is on the same level 

 and has exactly the same value as the venal 

 drivel of other quacks whose shibboleth he 

 adopts. Let me say to him that enlightened 

 therapeutists give medicines nearly always 



