868 HEALTH. 



the race. Orthodox medicine in this century is a substitution and 

 not a continuation of the science of the last: it has no right to be 

 offended with upstarts, for it is not more than fifty years since itself 

 arose out of the crucibles and dissecting rooms. In a word, it has 

 many experiments, but almost no traditions. Each fresh version of 

 our Pharmacopoeia carefully weeds out old simples, and fills their 

 places with chemicals, exterminating this and that to make room for 

 the last new compounds. 



With regard to the second, or scientific clement, we do not find 

 that it has placed physic upon any basis but that of experimenta- 

 tion; and that not integral, but chemical experimentation. If the 

 body were a pure acid, or alkali, housing nothing but affinities, it 

 could hardly be more industriously tested by all the new products 

 of the laboratory, to see what they will do with it. And when the 

 perilous experiments have been made, no law comes out of them, 

 excepting that mankind, " having suffered many things of many phy- 

 sicians, and spent all, and being rather worse than better," is wearied 

 in the end and worn out in the process. This is to be expected, 

 where the most acrid substances which art can wring from nature, 

 are put in large quantities into the living frame, on nothing more 

 than an experimental hope. It is furthermore to be expected from 

 the course which physiology has taken in the rearing and breeding 

 of medical men. For it teaches them to think chemically of man 

 himself; to imagine him not as a human being with a spirit inside, 

 but as a plaster-statue of nucleated cells, whose life is manifested 

 in composition and decomposition. There can be no common sense 

 in treatment, where thought wanders into this chaos of petty prisons : 

 indeed one feels that if man is such a compost, blue pills and black 

 draughts are fit stuff, not only to medicine, but to feed him. In the 

 meantime, however, what becomes of the treatment of disease ? 



The consequences of this system, in which nearly all but the 

 chemical side is neglected, have been seen by its orthodox adherents, 

 and if we remember aright there is even a school calling itself 

 " Young Physic," which recognizes the probability that medicine 

 does more harm than good, and that the secret of the superior suc- 

 cess of parties to be mentioned presently, depends upon their good 

 fortune in "doing nothing." This protestantism of theirs demands a 



