MEDICINE 307 



of herbs and roots has been almost entirely abandoned. 

 She has her purgatives, her swporifica, diaphoretica ; she 

 says that Aloes increases the peristaltic movements of the 

 bowels, and that strychnine paralyses the nerves, &c. ; 

 but why these remedies act thus and not otherwise, this 

 she does not explain. 



Modern medicine requires, so to say, a sledge-hammer 

 for killing a fly ; but the finer natural remedies, such as 

 have not a merely mechanical, gross, immediate, and de- 

 structive action, have almost entirely disappeared from the 

 pharmacopoeia, and, as harmless and useless, been remitted 

 to the care of old women. Their action is not under- 

 stood ; because it is not so violent as that of the poisons 

 used by the orthodox " regular " physician, and therefore 

 the effects produced are not at once apparent to the eye ; 

 but while the finer forces of Nature silently and noise- 

 lessly act upon the body of the patient, the violent 

 drugs administered by the modern practitioner usually 

 serve only to drive away effects by shifting the seat of the 

 disease to a still more interior and more dangerous place. 



The doctrines of Paracelsus go to show that the same 

 power which exists in the mind of the universe, and 

 which produced a star on the sky, is also capable to 

 become manifest as a plant ; that the whole world con- 

 sists of various states of spirit, having become embodied 

 or corporified in forms in Nature, in which the qualities 

 of the will, which produced them, is represented and 

 made manifest ; and that, all things originating primarily 

 out of one will-spirit, they are all related together and 

 may be made to act upon each other by the law of induc- 

 tion. Each thing, from the sun down to a tumour in the 

 body of an animal, constitutes a certain state of vibra- 

 tion of the one original essence, and by applying a 

 renaedy which is in a near relation to a diseased organ 

 (according to the quality of its spirit) we can induce a 

 healthy action in that organ, and thus restore its normal 

 condition. 



