HOMOEOPATHY. 377 



written evidence of these stupid sanguinary methods ; the doctrine 

 has followed the works with a vengeance, and the science has been 

 purged and bled away until nothing is left but chemical dust on the 

 one hand, or germ-cells on the other. This has gone so far that it 

 is doubtful now, whether the medical profession has any further 

 power of pursuing human physiology ; doubtful whether that great 

 knowledge must not pass to the laity and the gentiles, and become 

 a non-medical science. Certainly, the hands that have least been 

 crimsoned in the bowels of the living man, seem by nature most fit 

 to receive his tender and amazing secrets. 



Another department also is that of mental effects, in which 

 homoeopathy stands preeminent. If each drug evokes symptoms 

 throughout the body, it also affects the mind wherever it touches the 

 organs; and hence the new pharmacopoeia groups around it mental 

 and moral states so far as they depend upon the body. In this re- 

 spect homoeopathy opens a field which was untouched before, and in- 

 cludes the healing of moods, minds and tempers under the action of 

 medicines. How valuable this is as an adjunct of education, will 

 suggest itself at once to all fathers and mothers; and how new a 

 power it is, those best know who have become converts to homoe- 

 opathy after practicing the old system of medicine. 



It is, however, in the eradication of chronic diseases and heredi- 

 tary taints, that homoeopathy promises perhaps the greatest of its 

 benefits. On this subject the views of Hahnemann deserve the at- 

 tention of philanthropists of every degree, whilst at the same time 

 they are highly interesting to the medical philosopher. Nay, there 

 is a touch of the sublime about them, such as only comes into the 

 scientific spirit in its happiest moods. As Hahnemann teaches us 

 of the trine contagions that have come down with man from early 

 days, we seem to hear echoes of every mythos that has struck us 

 with significance before, from the Parsee dualism of Ahriman and 

 Ormuzd, to the blue-white Hela of Scandinavian faith; nay also we 

 are let into the understrata of that evil which throws out sulphurs 

 and geysers in the human and inhuman worlds : and we cease to 

 wonder that no cure comes, when the pit of disease is so deep. What 

 a chasteness of genius too in Hahnemann, that instead of swerving 

 to speculation, he forced these conceptions through the outlets of 



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