ALLOPATHY V. HOMOEOPATHY. 
441 
ALLOPATHY v. HOMCEOPATHY. 
A Reply to Mr. Haycock's Papers on Homoeopathy. By Finlay 
DuNj V.S., Lecturer on Materia Medica and Dietetics 
at the Edinburgh Veterinary College. 
I am sorry to occupy the pages of the Veterinarian with 
further discussion regarding homoeopathy, but I cannot leave 
unanswered the dubious facts and specious reasoning which 
Mr. Haycock has last month adduced in support oi his 
system. 
After serious plaint regarding the roughness and ridicule 
with which I have handled his darling subject, . Mr. 
Haycock proceeds to rake up the old and oft-vanquished 
forces with which homoeopathy has for years past been 
making feeble fight with rational medicine, and to set forth 
what are styled the “ facts 99 supporting the law of similars. 
But he still fails to supply the homoeopathic limits of that 
much abused and conveniently indefinite word similar . Now, 
without this definition, all his talk about homoeopathy is 
perfectly vague and useless. We must, as I have already 
said, learn, at the very outset, what amount of similarity 
ought, according to orthodox homoeopathy, to subsist be- 
tween the symptoms of the disease and those produced by 
the remedy. “ Some similarity is affirmed as requisite to 
effect a mild, certain, and permanent cure ; e as much simi- 
larity as possible 9 is authoritatively declared as most favor- 
able to success ; but when the similarity becomes too close, 
when resemblance passes into identity, or, in other words, 
when the symptoms of the malady and the effects of the 
medicine become the same , then, if we understand Mr. 
Haycock, all curative efficacy ceases.” — Veterinarian , June, 
p. 324. 
Mr. Haycock best knows why he permits this ambiguity 
to rest around a word on which, by his own admission, the 
whole fabric of homoeopathy depends. 
My brief leisure prevents me at present following Mr. 
Haycock through the thirteen pages of his ramblings ; but I 
shall endeavour, very cursorily, to show that the facts adduced, 
admitting them to be perfectly correct, are quite inadequate 
to establish the homoeopathic doctrine. To begin with 
sulphur, Mr. Haycock, quoting from Erasmus Wilson, 
says : — “ If its use be prolonged, it may be the occasion of an 
eruption similar to the eruption of itch.” And he further 
xxvii. 58 
