ON THE VAGARIES OF MEDICINE. 229 



yellowish brown color, resembling bile, and of a bitter taste. Numer- 

 ous as are the favorable results of this practice, the profession deny 

 the theory, because it is found efificacious in certain cases, in others it 

 is no good. As the discharge from a blistered surface will not dimin- 

 ish the discharge from an inflamed eye, or remove the excessive secre- 

 tions in dropsy, the principle is recognized as an adjunct, but rejected 

 as a theory. 



The third, Homoeopathia has had its rage and struggled hard for 

 supremacy, but its benefits are found too circumscribed for general 

 principles. In this medicines are selected as curatives which would 

 produce similar effects in the normal state, hence " Similia similibua 

 curantur." Like the two preceeding, this theoiy was known to the 

 ancients, and by some carried to great length. Aristotle prescribed "a 

 hair of the dog that bit you" as a preventive of madness, a now estab- 

 lished maxim, and followed faithfully as an antidote for a quite differ- 

 ent species of hydrophobia. The two most interesting points in this 

 are the principle of infinitesimal doses recently propounded by Hahne- 

 man in Germany, and their being carried along the nervous filaments 

 into the substance of the brain, as stated by Jahr of Paris, who ap- 

 pears to the former what Spurtzeim was to- Gall, the philosophiser of 

 his dogma. He asserts positively that in this way melancholy, grief — 

 a cacoethes scribendi, — particularly for poetry, and the more fatal 

 malady of love, have each their globule and each globule is a charm. 

 There have been some cases of lesion of the brain causing a marked 

 change in the person's mind without any subsequent malady. Boer- 

 haave describes a poet of his time, who, after recovery from an injury 

 of the kind, lost the art and denied his former offspring. 



The Reports of one of the London hospitals mention a "Welshman 

 twenty-five years of age, who had lived in England for twenty years 

 and spoken their language. After a protracted disease of the brain 

 he could only speak Welsh. I had, myself, the case of a boy five 

 years old, who lost two ounces of the substance of the brain from the 

 kick of a horse — previous to the injury he was unable to speak correct- 

 ly, and had nicknames for his brothers and sisters. After three weeks 

 ^quietude he recovered, and to the surprise of his parents spoke dis- 

 tinctly, calling each person by their proper name. On the other hand 

 it is said these results may have happened without any injury to the 

 brain, but were simply suspended memory from rest. The depend- 

 ence upon a too minute attenuation is discharged by that modern Paul 



