OF DIGESTION. 177 



which can be effected by processes entirely harmless. Their effect 

 upon the teeth alone brands them with unequivocal condemnation ; 

 for whatever injures them first disorders the stomach. Their decay 

 foretokens incipient dyspepsia. Hence, since they are always im- 

 paired by these medicines and whoever has taken poison is a living 

 witness of this fact they of course always enfeeble the stomach. 



Narrowing down our observation to that popular medicine CALO- 

 MEL. It powerfully stimulates the liver, but stimulates by POISON- 

 ING it. Hence liver affections almost always follow its administra- 

 tion always except when both stomach and liver are extra 

 powerful. Dyspepsia follows its use almost as surely as sunrise 

 daylight, because induced thereby. Let observation, the more 

 extensive the better, pronounce the verdict. Language can never 

 adequately portray its ravages on health and life. On this point 

 hear Professor Chapman, of Philadelphia, to his class : 



" GENTLEMEN: If you could see what I almost daily see in my private practice in 

 this city, persons from the South, in the very last stages of wretched existence, ema- 

 ciated to a skeleton, with both tables of the skull almost completely perforated in many 

 places, the nose half gone, with rotten jaws, ulcerated throats, breaths most pestiferous 

 more intolerable than poisonous upas, limbs racked with the pains of the Inquisition, 

 minds as imbecile as the puling babe, a grievous burden to themselves and a disgusting 

 spectacle to others, you would exclaim as I have often done, ' O ! the lamentable want 

 of science that dictates the abuse (use) of that noxious drug calomel !' Gentlemen, it is 

 a disgraceful reproach to the profession of medicine, it is quackery, horrid, unwarranted 

 murderous quackery. "What merit do gentlemen of the South flatter themselves they 

 possess by being able to salivate a patient? Cannot the veriest fool in Christendom 

 salivate give calomel 1 But I will ask another question. Who can stop its career a 

 will, after it has taken the reins in its own DESTRUCTIVE AND UNGOVERNABLE HANDS'? 

 rfe who, for an ordinary cause, resigns the fate of his patient to mercury, is a vile 

 enemy to the sick ; and if he is tolerably popular, will in one successful season have 

 paved the way for the business of life ; for he has enough to do ever afterwards to stop 

 the mercurial breach of'the constitutions of his dilapidated patients. He has thrown 

 himself in fearful proximity to death, and has now to fight him at arm's-length as long 

 as the patient maintains a miserable existence." 



Dr. Graham, of Edinburgh, in speaking of mercurial medicines, 



says : 



" They affect the human constitution in a peculiar manner, taking, so to speak, an 

 iron grasp of all its systems, and penetrating even to the bones, by which they not only 

 change the healthy action of its vessels, and general structure, but greatly impair and 

 destroy its energies ; so that their abuse is rarely overcome. When the tone of the 

 stomach, intestines, or nervous system generally, has been once injured by this 

 mineral, according to my experience (and I have paid considerable attention to the sub- 

 ject), it could seldom afterwards be restored. I have seen many persons to whom it has 

 been largely given for the removal of different complaints, who, before they took it, 

 knew not what indigestion and nervous depression meant, only by the description of 

 others - } but they iiave since become experimentally acquainted with both, for they now 

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