428 St. John Long on Consumption. [APRIL, 



As to the individual who now puts forward his claims to relieve the 

 community of some of the melancholy and hitherto desperate afflictions 

 of the human frame, we leave the reader to such evidence as his 

 book supplies. We agree with the judge's charge on his late trial, that 

 failure in a particular instance, being incidental to even the most authen- 

 ticated practitioners, is no ground for general distrust ; and that the 

 whole question must turn, in this matter as in similar ones, upon the 

 general result of the practice. 



" The faculty," says the Introduction, " admit that there are diseases beyond 

 their power to cure, that there are maladies the fatal termination of which 

 they may retard, but cannot arrest. In cases of pulmonary consumption, and 

 of various other disorders, they have no established remedies. Even as to 

 palliatives, how very few of their number agree. Their opinions are alike 

 discordant, whether they relate to the origin of the disease, or the means of 

 arresting its progress; and in nine instances out of ten they are compelled to 

 acknowledge the utter inefficacy and hopelessness of their prescriptions. They 

 stand in the presence of their dying patients more like ministers of religion 

 than professors of medical science, administering consolation to the mind rather 

 than anodynes to the body. But while they thus admit their inability to cure 

 those maladies, they nevertheless shut the door against all discoveries made 

 beyond their own arena, and denounce as empiricism even the success which 

 demonstrates the folly of their tenacious adherence to exploded rules. They 

 are not content with seeing their patients languish under their hands, they con- 

 tend for the exclusive right of attending their last moments. Beyond their 

 pale they would have the world believe there is no talent, no acquaintance 

 with the disorders incident to humanity, and consequently no remedy for the 

 diseases which they pronounce immedicable." 



Talking calmly on this subject, a great part of what is here said of the 

 exclusive system of the English physicians is true. Their degrees and 

 forms restrict them within a certain boundary, and the greater number 

 of our established medical men are content to follow the track marked 

 out for them by the ordinances of the College : while of twenty cases of 

 disease, and even of the same disease, there may not be two which allow 

 of the same treatment. Almost the whole cf the remarkable remedies 

 have undoubtedly been discovered out of this pale. And allowing, as 

 we readily do, the advantage of having a body of educated men prepared 

 to avail themselves of those remarkable discoveries, the whole of which, 

 without exception we believe, have been owing to accident, yet it is 

 perfectly clear that discovery is much less their object than a formal 

 adherence to practice. However, those times and things must have an 

 end ; and without a direct determination on the part of the regular pro- 

 fessors to reject all advantageous inventions, nothing can be more 

 notorious than that the science of medicine, if science it must be called, 

 has made no advances in our time at all correspondent to the general 

 progress in other branches of knowledge. It is equally notorious that 

 consumption is a disease which almost throws the regular practitioner 

 into despair. He feels that nothing must be done which has not been 

 done before ; and he feels, also, that the whole amount of what has been 

 done before was to make the patient's path a little smoother, arid a little 

 slower to the grave. As to the secret by which, in the present day, con- 

 sumption, and its kindred ills, is asserted to be cured, no man can pro- 

 nounce anything until it is divulged. But there is at least something 

 in the announcement that consumption is not the desperate disease 

 which the faculty have universally declared it to be ; that distemper in 



