HOMCEOPATHY. 373 



It would be curious to consider how it is that medicinal substances 

 so attenuated are still true to themselves, and exert their properties 

 upon the body ; for the fact is beyond question. Although we can- 

 not resolve this enigma, yet there are analogies which somewhat 

 domesticate it in our understandings. In the body, for instance, a 

 grain of any substance, or a spot of any feeling, is participatively 

 present throughout; a dose of calomel influences the frame, and if 

 we may use the expression, calomelizes it ; the wound inflicted by a 

 needle point gives a sensation to the man, or hurts the great body 

 itself. It is not that the agent is materially everywhere ; but the 

 patient is set in the attitude of the effect, and feels it universally. 

 We may therfore look on organisms as universes that vibrate from 

 one end to the other with every force that assails them ; and thus in 

 their own way become the magnitudes and propagations of the force. 

 This is plainly shown in contagions, which engrafted upon the smallest 

 part of the body at first, in the next place run morbidly through it, 

 and ferment the frame into a new but greater vesicle of a morbid 

 kind ; after which the social propagation begins, and a continent 

 may be infected from that first grain of disease, thus shaken and 

 dynamized in human body after human body, and not diminished 

 but aggravated by its propagation. In this we have a clear image 

 of the dynamization of medicinal powers, which received in any ve- 

 hicle (e. g., alcohol), and properly vibrated, seem to convert it into 

 their own likeness, just as if it were an organism capable of trans- 

 mission of effects or community of feelings. But let our explana- 

 tion stand for no more than it is worth, and be considered as a word 



cure every disorder. Nor is to be expected that an art which is in its infancy, 

 can do more than greatly surpass in safety and virtue the Hippocratic medicine 

 of 2,000 years' standing. Yet, whenever a death occurs under homoeopathy, the 

 neighborhood argues and acts as though homoeopathy had invented death, which 

 was a phenomenon unknown until Hahnemann brought it from the infernal re- 

 gions ! Why ! the bills of mortality since Hippocrates are the bills of allopathy. 

 And in most cases, let the worst that can occur, it is no worse, and no more, 

 than happens daily under that practice. But if the patient dies under allopathy, 

 he dies by precedent, and there is no responsibility ; if homoeopathy is at his bed- 

 side, he departs unsanctioned, and the survivors have to answer for him to 

 public opinion. This must be borne until the battle is further fought, and those 

 who are not prepared to endure it had better not dabble in homoeopathy. 



32 



