538 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



arsenic, ipecacuanha, turpentine, mix vomica and its alkaloid, strych- 

 nia, and camphor. Explain the action in any way we choose as sub- 

 stitutive, as the primary differing from the secondary effects of the 

 drug, etc. the relationship of similarity, however problematical its 

 value, still remains. 



Not seldom has the reproach been cast upon homoeopathy that it 

 possesses no literature worthy of the name ; that its followers can 

 boast no valuable discoveries or original research. In the main, the 

 criticism is just. But, in this one department of medical science, the 

 profession has received at its hands an incalculable benefit. It claims, 

 and for the most part rightly, the credit of advancing, directly or 

 indirectly, the study of the physiological action of drugs, as related to 

 the alleviation and cure of disease. The careful experiments thus set 

 on foot have thrown a light upon the selection and intelligent use of 

 remedies which has largely revised the old system of therapeutics. 

 Homceopathy has, undoubtedly, given to the world the revelation of 

 more than one valuable truth, and the profession and people alike owe 

 to it, in the persons of its advanced thinkers, the gratitude of respect 

 and recognition. In short, as " every student is a debtor to his whole 

 profession," so the schools of medicine are mutually beholden to each 

 other. The same influences which have modified the one sect have 

 served to liberalize both. The practical result, as already manifest, is 

 of greater interest to the public than are the steps by which it has 

 been reached. A careful study of the course of treatment commonly 

 pursued by leading practitioners, and recommended by the highest au- 

 thorities in the two schools, reveals the fact that, in eighty selected 

 forms of disease, representing maladies of every type and every stage, 

 six tenths of the remedies employed by these supposedly rival schools 

 are identically the same in kind, and differ only in respect of dose. 

 The variance is no greater than probably exists between the respective 

 methods of practice of any two physicians of either school. Were 

 disease an entity, and its types invariable, we might look for the es- 

 tablishment of a universal law of therapeutics ; but, considering all 

 the varying conditions of age, sex, temperament, habit, hereditary 

 tendency, personal idiosyncrasy, climate, and general surroundings, it 

 is, in the nature of things, impossible. Between homoeopathic and 

 " regular " physicians there is but one legitimate ground of quarrel 

 and herein the latter have sufficient cause of complaint namely, the 

 continuance, by their old-time opponents, of name and title suggestive 

 of a rigid exclusivism, indicative of their supposed arrival at the 

 ultima TJiule of medical research, and their adherence to a universal 

 dogma, to which, as such, they can no longer honestly adhere. Why 

 should it not be possible for a guild of men, interested in so grand an 

 object as the relief of suffering and the conservation of human life, to 

 join cordial hands with their fellow-laborers in a common cause, and 

 content themselves with the unequivocal name of physician, and the 



