Human Physiology. 



has been practised with great success at places specially adapted 

 to the treatment over the Continent of Europe, in America, 

 at Malvern, in England, and in various places in the United 

 Kingdom. 



There is a difficulty in arriving at a correct judgment respect- 

 ing the efficacy of any and all modes of medical treatment. In 

 the first place there is always a tendency to cure, an effort of 

 nature to overcome and cast out disease, and substitute healthy 

 for morbid action. A cut finger quickly and wonderfully heals. 

 Nature mends a broken bone all that surgery can do is to put 

 and keep the parts in the right position, and bathe them in 

 cold water to moderate inflammation. Surgery watches, but 

 never heals. Doctors of the Expectant school do the same, 

 giving no medicine, or only such as will excite hope and 

 confidence in the patient. Even in virulent epidemics a large 

 proportion of those attacked recover, whatever be the mode of 

 treatment ; and the homoeopathic hospitals, and those in which 

 the negative or expectant system is followed, where there is 

 merely good nursing and health conditions, have as large a 

 proportion of cures, sometimes a larger, than those under the 

 care of the so-called regular faculty. 



And under any system of practice it is very difficult to say in 

 most cases what is due to the prescribed treatment impossible 

 to know absolutely whether the patient might not have been better, 

 or recovered more rapidly, without the medicine. Consequently 

 we find equally honest, educated, enlightened men pursuing 

 the most opposite systems, and that all systems are success! uL 

 More, the most arrant quackeries, the most utter impostures, 

 vaunt their wonderful cures. There is no doubt that every pill, 

 every nostrum, every catholicon, advertised and puffed in the 

 newspapers, even magnetic belts and skewasma, "act like 

 a charm " upon those who have the faith to purchase and use 

 them ; and a man who will give a guinea for a bit of copper 

 and zinc wire twisted together, and believe it can create and 



