754 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



mentation in all ages and with all schools of medicine I claim that by 

 the rigid following out of the principles here taught it will be possible 

 for even the humblest member of the profession to take any new remedy, 

 and, if a sufficient number of cases be provided, to accurately determine 

 some points at least of its therapeutic value, if it really possesses any 

 that are capable of being demonstrated to the senses or reason of man. 

 It is the unconscious or unformulated apprehension of these errors in 

 the working up of remedies that causes so many of the profession to take 

 at certain periods of their lives the extreme and unscientific view that 

 all medication is a mistake — that drugs have no power outside of the 

 mind of the one who takes them — and consequently, and logically, to 

 trust only to the forces of nature and hygiene. 



In relation to this branch of our theme, it is worthy of note that 

 there are certain modes of treating disease which from the very nature 

 and manner of their employment can not be experimented with in a 

 truly scientific way ; it is impossible to use them so as to deceive the 

 patient on whom they are used ; of necessity, therefore, they must be 

 developed by the process of successive eliminations already described. 

 Among the medical procedures of this class are hydro-therapeutics or 

 hydropathy, electro-therapeutics, and massage, or systematized rubbing, 

 kneading, and manipulation ; none of these remedial operations can be 

 used without the patient's knowledge ; none of them can be used in a 

 different way from what the patient supposes they are being used ; they 

 are open, in clear sight, and affect the various senses so strikingly that 

 satisfactory deception is impossible ; patients know when they are 

 being galvanized or faradized; they know when they are washed or 

 showered; they know when they are rubbed and kneaded; no art or 

 device of the phj'sician can avail to so deceive them as to absolutely 

 eliminate the error that comes from the hope or fear or expectation of 

 what the treatment is to accomplish. The practical value of these 

 methods of treatment — and they are all of undoubted value — could only 

 be ascertained, as it has been ascertained, by the immense variety of 

 the experiments that have been made with them, wherein through the 

 process of time the six sources of error have been little by little elimi- 

 nated. 



In all new remedies and systems of treatment the aim of the scien- 

 tific physician should be to make the deception so thorough that what- 

 ever effects are obtained must be known positively to be the objective 

 action of the treatment or of nature. The criticism which I make on 

 Burq, Charcot, and others, who have recently experimented with the 

 action of metals of different kinds on the an.'esthesia of hysterical pa- 

 tients, is that they left the question open when, by a systematic, or- 

 derly, and thorough provision against these six sources of error, they 

 had it in their power, with the vast material at their command, to have 

 absolutely closed it ; if they could not determine with certainty whether 

 the temporary disappearance of the anaesthesia on the application of 



