144 BAILLY. 
the present best established medical theories occasioned 
at their birth prolonged debates; when he reminds us 
that several medicines have been alternately proscribed 
and recommended with vehemence: the author might 
even have more deeply undermined this side of his sub- 
ject. Instead of some unmeaning jokes, why did he not 
show us, for example, in a neighbouring country, two 
celebrated physicians, Mead and Woodward, deciding, 
sword in hand, the quarrel that had arisen between them 
as to the purgative treatment of a patient? We should 
then have heard Woodward, pierced through and through, 
rolling on the ground, and drenched in blood, say to his 
adversary with an exhausted voice: “The blow was 
harsh, but yet I prefer it to your medicine! ” 2 
It is not truth alone that has the privilege of rendering 
men passionate. Such was the legitimate result of these 
retrospective views. I now ask myself whether, by 
labouring to put the truth of this aphorism in full light, 
the passionate advocate of Mesmerism showed proof of 
ability ! 
Gentlemen, let us put all these personal attacks aside, — 
all these recriminations against science and its agents, 
who unfortunately had not succeeded in restoring the 
health of the morose magistrate. What remains then of 
his pamphlet? ‘Two chapters, only two chapters, in 
which Bailly’s report is treated seriously. The medical 
commissioners and the members of the Academy had not 
seen, in the real effects of Mesmerism anything more than 
was occasioned by imagination. The celebrated magis- 
trate exclaims on this subject, “ Any one hearing this 
proposition spoken of would suppose, before reading the 
report, that the commissioners had treated and cured, or 
considerably relieved by the force of imagination, large 
