HOM(EOPATHY. 375 



drugged generations ! What vigor may we not expect from the 

 later posterities of those who have not hurt mind and body by sup- 

 ping on material poisons ? How much better those childhoods will 

 be, whose parents and grandparents have neither been bled nor sali- 

 vated secundum artem, but who have kept their own current in their 

 veins, and given it entire to their race ? And on the positive side, 

 what another gain it will be, when hereditary maladies begin to be 

 displaced, and the crust that hides man drops down from his skin by 

 degrees ! What virtues may we not expect, when with all higher 

 helps to good, the body itself seconds the monitions of the soul ! 

 What talents also, and what happiness, when the frame is set in 

 parallelism with the order of things ! For though we do not attri- 

 ute everything to body, yet a sound body has consequences which 

 make it needful to speculate upon it in all views that concern the 

 advancement of our species. 



On the theoretical side, Hahnemann has approximated drug-heal- 

 ing to the pure sciences ; and by instituting experiments on the 

 healthy body, he has expanded the properties of each medicine to a 

 human form of symptoms, naturally, by that form, applicable to 

 man. I think of medicines now as curative personalities, who take 

 our shape upon them to battle in us with our ills. The testing of 

 their characters is also capable of being carried to the utmost ex- 

 actitude; for drugs may be "proved" upon many persons in differ- 

 ent places and at different times, and their symptoms curtailed, sifted, 

 and if we may use the phrase, pared and sculptured down, until only 

 their essential and nude form is left. When we get these heroes on 

 their feet, they, and not their discoverers, will be the great men of 

 an ever-young physic. 



It is hard to imagine how any profession can disregard the service 

 that Hahnemann has begun, in the constitution of a rational phar- 

 macopoeia. When we look to what was known of medicinal pro- 

 perties before his time, and then compare it with the state in which 

 he left the subject, the difference is like that between light and 

 darkness. No one had imagined that each drug ran through the 

 frame, and evoked fresh symptoms from organ after organ ; nor in- 

 deed without the similia similibus curantur would any application 

 come from the fact. But it is an attestation of that formula, that 



