xxxii PREFACE, 



tice of medicine to confess, with a sigh over the vanity of human 

 learning, that our choicest remedies, and our most approved 

 modes of cure, are generally, if not universally, derived from 

 empirics, and those the most unlearned ; and that, however 

 the methodics, or school-bred practitioners, have laboured to 

 explain the modes of action, and the reasons for the effects pro- 

 duced, they have done little or nothing towards the improvement 

 of the practice. 



It must be owned, indeed, that it is not a little mortifying to a 

 practitioner educated in the best medical schools, to see himself 

 cast off for the advice of an empiric, especially as this rejection 

 is not confined to the soldier or the ploughman, but happens 

 even in the palace, where although on the first accession of dis- 

 ease the school-bred methodic, who practices in a general way, 

 is consulted ; yet, if the disease proves tedious, the confidence 

 of the patient is shaken, the school-bred attendant is dismissed, 

 and the patient throws himself into the power of some home- 

 bred empiric, of known experience in the medical art, although, 

 in other respects, perhaps the rudest and most ignorant of his 

 neighbours, whose medicines are taken and his directions followed 

 with that implicit obedience and faith, which had they been given 

 in the first instance to the original practitioner might have had 

 the desired success. 



And it may be finally remarked, that the home-bred practi- 

 tioner, although he is frequently ignorant, notwithstanding his 

 thirst for knowledge, because his poverty obliges him to content 

 himself with any old medical books that may accidentally fall in 

 his way, yet he is not the enemy of the school-bred practitioner, 

 and in general a paltry rival, because he scarcely practises, 

 except in remote villages, or upon the poor, who carmot afford the 

 attendance of a regular-bred man, or in chronic cases which have 

 been previously treated by the school-bred practitioner until the 

 patience of the sick is exhausted. 



The real enemies of the fair practitioner are those persons 

 "who, impelled by a commercial rather than a philosophic spirit, 

 become nostrum-mongers, and frequently in defiance of their 

 better knowledge, recommend, in pompous terms, some inert or 

 dangerous medicine to the notice of the sick, and thus encourage 

 them to practise upon themselves. A practice of the most 



