Inaugural Address. 47 
Again, honey was employed in ancient times, as still it is, 
as a useful application to relieve aphthous eruptions in the 
mouth and fauces; but then the relief obtained was attributed 
not immediately to the mean employed, but intermediately to 
an extraneous coincidence foreign to its nature, and only there- 
with fortuitously connected; i. e. the cure was ascribed by 
Soranus, who records a case in point, not to the honey, as 
honey, but to the accidental circumstance of that honey, which 
wrought the cure he mentions, having been procured from 
bees that had hived near Hippocrates’ tomb. 
Thus when men prescribed medicines, of the properties of 
which there was little known, for diseases, of the pathology 
of which they knew much less, it cannot be surprising 
that, although sometimes, perchance, they might assist re- 
covery, more frequently they would do no good; and not 
uncommonly they would do much harm. Still, such was the 
perverseness of superstition, such the obtuseness of her 
votaries, that, whenever recovery ensued after the adminis- 
tration of any remedial means, were it either independent, 
or even in spite, of its effects, the cure was immediately 
attributed thereto; and when, as oftentimes occurred in 
cases of real disease, (although many slight or supposititious 
ailments would occasionally disappear during the exhibition,) 
it failed to cure or to relieve, some trifling variation in 
attendant circumstances, such as the mode or hour of admi- 
nistration or collection, or some such other trifling irregula- 
vo not only foreign but impertinent to the question, was 
erred to as the source of failure: and hence arose many 
of those superstitious rites which figure so strangely in the 
medical records of antiquity. Thus, if, as we are told, the 
vervain cured the falling sickness in one individual, and in 
another failed; i. e. if after its administration one individual 
got better, and another worse, and if it was observed, or even 
ancied, that the latter had gathered the herb with his right 
hand, and the former with his left, this supposed ceremonial 
irregularity was esteemed a sufficient cause of failure; and 
hence arose the dogma that vervain should be gathered with 
the left hand only; but when, as could not but occur, of the 
left hand gatherers, some recovered and others died, further 
sources of disappointment were invented, and any thing was 
doubted rather than the potency of the plant when charmed ; 
such as the time, the previous incantations, and other such 
like matters. But, in spite of all precautions, failures still 
ensued, and as fast as failures multiplied, so fast increased 
the ceremonials likewise, until at length we learn that the 
vervain was to be gathered with the left hand only, libations 
