374 HEALTH. 



to those only who like to see, not merely that the fact is so, but that 

 besides being true, it is also not improbable. 



Whatever be the hypothesis of the properties of drugs in in- 

 finitesimal doses, the fact remains the same, and Hahnemann has 

 the credit of testing pharmaceutical substances with a rigor of which 

 his predecessors had no conception. The vagueness of medical 

 practice disgusted him, offending intellect and conscience alike, and 

 for a time he retired from a profession in which he had so little 

 faith. His own discovery — that like is to be cured by like — then 

 came forth, and by an easy process the whole strangeness of homoeo- 

 pathy developed itself. The diminution of the doses took place by 

 degrees along a road of linked facts, in which there was little room 

 for fallacy : there is no case in inductive science in which experi- 

 ment was more minutely perfect. Cures followed, and have ever 

 since followed, on a scale to which the orthodox medicine was a 

 stranger : the statistics of homoeopathy, taken in Government hos- 

 pitals, and under military strictness, show a lessened, mortality as 

 compared with the tables of its rival. And wherever it is fairly 

 practiced, the same average results occur ; so that in spite of much 

 opposition, it spreads from the healed to the sick, and the rumor of 

 its beneficence is stronger with a sensible public than the diatribes 

 of a very active and influential profession arrayed against it. 



The practical blessings of the New Medicine are dependent, as 

 we conceive, firstly upon the science of correspondence, which bring- 

 ing poison and disease together with a completer fitness, poisons 

 the disease, and kills it ; and secondly, upon the smallness of the 

 doses, or we would rather say, the use of the spirit and not the body 

 of the drugs; which use gains its cause by no destruction of our 

 tissues, but by giving the body an attitude that neutralizes the dis- 

 ease, and then itself ceases after a certain duration of effects. Drugs 

 given in the latter way are more like ideas than material bodies, and 

 when they have served their purpose, they either vanish of them- 

 selves, or may be countermanded by their appropriate antidotes. 



I suppose it is impossible to overrate the consequences of Hahne- 

 mann's life. Even the negative results are vast for our future well- 

 being. How different, for example, from the pale faces that we 

 note in every street, will be those which belong some day to un- 



