16 CAUSES OF COMPLAINT. 



system of man, they are also adapted to injure that of the 

 horse, and all domestic animals. If they ever recover from the 

 effects of the lancet and poison, we must attribute it to the 

 power of the system to defend itself against all encroach- 

 ments upon its sanative operations. If good medicine, such 

 as experience teaches us, always operates in favor of health, 

 and has a tendency to remove disease, it always has that 

 tendency, both on man and domestic animals, and is proper 

 to be administered whenever the state of the system demands 

 it. The great fault of physicians, in estimating the labors 

 of their predecessors, has ever been, that they either received 

 or condemned by wholesale every previous system, abandon- 

 ing the truth with the errors, and subjecting themselves to 

 the necessity of travelling over the whole ground again. By 

 this means their confidence is impaired in their ability ever 

 to arrive at the simple truth. 



Hippocrates, the earliest systematic writer on medicine, 

 discovered by careful observation the existence of a principle 

 which he styled Nature. To this principle he attributes a 

 species of intelligence, and conceived that one of its most 

 important offices is to attract to the body what is beneficial, 

 and to reject from it what would prove injurious. This is a 

 truth which no argument can disprove. 



Sydenham says our misfortunes proceed from our having 

 long since forsaken our skilful guide, Hippocrates, and the 

 ancient method of cure founded upon the knowledge of 

 conjunct cases that plainly appear, insomuch that the art 

 which is this day practised, being invented by superficial 

 reasoning, is rather the art of talking than of healing. 



D'Alembert represents the state of the science : " Nature 

 is fighting with disease. A blind man armed with a club, 

 that is, a physician, comes to settle the difference. He first 

 tries to make peace. When he cannot accomplish this, he 

 lifts his club and strikes at random. If he strikes the disease, 

 he kills the disease ; if he strikes nature, he kills nature." 



The very principles upon which medical theories are based 

 were never established. They are, and always were, false. 



