REPORT ON ANIMAL MAGNETISM. — 148 
he gives full scope to his satirical vein. He holds it even 
as an honour that they do not regard him as impartial. 
“ The doctors have killed me ; what it has pleased them 
to leave me of life is not worth, in truth, my seeking a 
milder term. ..... For these twenty years I have 
always been worse through the remedies administered to 
me than through my maladies..... . Even were 
animal magnetism a chimera, it should be tolerated ; it 
would still be useful to mankind, by saving many indi- 
viduals among them from the incontestable dangers of 
vulgar medicine. .... I wish that medicine, so long 
accustomed to deceive itself, should still deceive itself 
now, and that the famous report be nothing but a great 
error. . . . . .” Amidst these singular declarations, 
there are hundreds of epigrams still more remarkable by 
their ingenious and lively turn than by their novelty. If 
it were true, Gentlemen, that the medical corps had ever 
tried, knowingly, to impose on the vulgar, to hide the 
uncertainty of their knowledge, the weakness of their 
theories, the vagueness of their conceptions, under an 
obscure and pedantic jargon, the immortal and laughable 
sarcasms of Moliére would not have been more than an 
act of strict justice. In all cases every thing has its day ; 
now, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the most 
delicate, the most thorny points of doctrine were discussed 
with an entire good faith, with perfect lucidity, and in a 
style that placed many members of the faculty in the 
rank of our best speakers. Servan, however, goes be- 
yond the limits of a scientific discussion, when, without 
any sort of excuse, he accuses his adversaries of being 
anti-mesmerists through esprit de corps, and, what is 
worse, through cupidity. 
Servan is more in his element when he points out that 
