HOFFMAN, CULLEN, AND BROUSSALS. 983 



" avoid drugs and physicians, if you value your 

 health." There is a still more severe satire on 

 the Faculty, by one of its own fraternity, in the 

 following lines of Faustus by Goethe : 



" Thus with our hellish drugs, death's ceaseless fountains, 

 In these bright vales, o'er these green mountains, 



Worse than the plague we raged : 

 I have myself to thousands poison given, 

 And hear their murder praised as bless'd by heaven, 



Because with nature strife he waged." 



Even Dr. Cullen tells us, in his work on the 

 Practice of Physic, that a purge often brings on 

 a relapse of intermittent fever, after the paroxysms 

 had ceased. The doctrine of Broussais, that all 

 fevers depend on inflammation of the stomach 

 and bowels, was partial and erroneous ; yet it had 

 the good effect of lessening the use of emetics and 

 purgatives, which, although sometimes useful in 

 removing morbid accumulations, often aggravate 

 the disease.* And although the Homoeopathic 

 theory be founded on a series of hypotheses that 



* The late Dr. M'Culloch was still more opposed to the use of 

 emetics, cathartics, and other active medicines, which together 

 with blood-letting, he ranks among the principal causes of disease. 

 And Dr. James Johnson observes, that " in a great majority of 

 the mild fevers in temperate climates, it is probable that nature 

 would be more successful than art, or the farrago of medicines 

 prescribed by the routine practitioner." But he facetiously adds, 

 " let not this, however, be told in Gath." And he very properly 

 ridicules the prevalent self-quackery of taking calomel, or some 

 other mercurial preparation, for the removal of what is called 

 biliousness. 



3 S 



