Present and Prospective 195 



bleedings, purgings, vomitings and druggings once 

 in fashion. Think for a moment on what hap- 

 pened when medicine blindly attacked symptoms 

 at first sight — on the sort of treatment, for ex- 

 ample, which a poor wretch suffering from scabies 

 underwent before the insect of that disease was 

 discovered. What mischievous measures, again, 

 were employed to provoke the pouring out of 

 " laudable pus" where no pus should be ! That 

 the practice of warring against symptoms, which 

 are effects and signals, perhaps useful outlets, 

 of the disease, by trying to suppress them, instead 

 of striking at the cause and letting the symptoms 

 alone, is now obsolete, would be too much to 

 say ; it is not long since the violent lowering of 

 high febrile temperature by frequent doses of anti- 

 pyrin was the fashion ; and still, I fear, large use 

 is sometimes made of opium, chloral, and their like 

 to quench the fire of acute mania, notwithstanding 

 that, smothered for the moment, its flame blazes 

 more fiercely afterwards, to the prolongation of 

 the disease and peril of the patient's life. A 

 lesson of human history which the history of 

 medicine signally confirms is that error does not 

 become truth because it is repeated thousands of 

 times by many thousand tongues. Might not the 

 lesson aptly be applied to the valuation of some 

 current medical theories ? I suspect that if a 

 competent thinker, constituting himself a sort of 

 advocatus diaboli, were to write a book entitled 

 Medical Doubts, setting forth reasons why some 



