The Evolution of Medical Science. 141 



minds of many people to-day, making them decline to use 

 mineral drugs if they know them as such. It is really a 

 wonder they do not stop drinking water, every drop of 

 which is charged with minerals. Salt, too, is a mineral. 

 Why do they take it ? The fact is that they could not live 

 a second but for minerals. The mineral iron makes their 

 blood red ; the mineral lime constitutes the great bulk of 

 their bones ; the mineral phosphorus supplies the thinking 

 power of their brains ; the poisonous mineral, muriatic acid, 

 helps digest the food in their stomachs ; the minerals soda 

 and potash help digest the fatty parts of their food. 



When antagonistic medical parties could not find theolog- 

 ical grounds for a fight, they usually resorted to the cry of 

 "poison !" Even now, in this 19th Century, that word has 

 a terror to most people, worse than that of "mad dog." It 

 never seems to occur to them that it is a purely relational 

 term. Viewed one way, there is no such thing as a poison. 

 Viewed another way, everything is poisonous. Weight for 

 weight, and equally compressed, the oxygen of the air is the 

 most deadly poison known to man. A troy ounce of oxygen 

 will kill more men, and in quicker time, than a troy ounce of 

 any other known substance, unless it is the new alkaloid lately 

 discovered and called strophanthine.* Yet we cannot live 

 without using it. In proper quantity it is a necessity of 

 life. Muriatic acid is a deadly, corrosive poison, and this, 

 too, is necessary to our existence, being supplied to our 

 system in the form of salt. As salt, its work is not done, 

 however. Too much heat will burn and destroy us, and too 

 little will freeze and destroy, while the proper proportion 

 aids health and life ; so, too much or too little of any and 

 all substances that exist acts in the same manner. Of 

 some we need more, and of others less, to maintain health. 

 Within the proper amount, nothing is poisonous. Out of 

 the proper amount, everything is poisonous. 



This is the truth that has evolved out of the fight be- 

 tween the disciples of Paracelsus and Galen. In both 

 of these camps, skepticism in time began to spread as to 

 the truth of the formula that similar cures similar. Slowly 

 there grew a tendency, never, however, definitely expressed, 

 to a belief that the reverse was true ; i. e., that Nature's 

 method was " contrai'ia contrariis curantvr.^^ Such was the 

 condition of things Avhen, in 1789, Hahnemann began his 



* Popular Science Monthly, vol. 11, p. 328. 



