436 Is Medicine a Science? 
the way in which it acts). Consequently, medicine as now 
practised, has lost all respect in a scientific point of view. 
In fact, it is by the universal consent of the learned driven 
from the pale of the sciences. It is considered no science 
at all—and never yet in the history of the world has it been 
a science. This is nowconfessed in the writings of its most 
advanced thinkers who make their boast that they scarcely 
give medicine at all, and only watch the case they attend. 
It may well be asked, what is the use of paying them for 
attending the patient whom they cannot relieve, and if they 
have no medicine to give him they cannot relieve him. 
But this is not true, they do give medicine as do the others, 
nauseating and torturing those whom they cannot relieve. 
Their motive in making such an assertion is, to escape in this 
manner, the dangerous rivalry of the homceopathists who 
have come into vogue by their centesimal doses of medicine, 
and watch also the protracted sufferings of their patients, at 
all events, with more truth and less injury and torture than 
their opponents. 
But some lately of the most eminent of the profession, 
have come out entirely, and openly declared that drugs are 
positively injurious, and kill more than they cure, and that 
if a certain number were treated by the medical men, and 
the same number of others left to themselves, a greater 
proportion of the latter would recover than of the former. 
In the meantime, the ignorant public who will not attend 
to such a subject till they are sick, are put to torture, and 
perhaps, not unfrequently physicked to death. We havea 
lively account of this torture in a popular work, very widely 
circulated, “My Wanderings,” by J. Gadesby. Mr. Gades- 
by caught a severe cold and applied to a doctor. He gra- 
dually got worse, and consulted the foremost men in the pro- 
fession, such as Sir James Clarke, Dr. Watson, Sir Benjamin 
Brodie, &c. They pronounced him in a deep consumption, 
but differed entirely as to the lung affected, some saying it 
was the right, others the left, nor did they agree any better 
as to the treatment. One saying he ought to go toa cold 
climate, another to a hot one. Amongst them, however, he 
was leeched, blistered, cupped, flayed alive with croton oil, 
purged, sweated and put through the whole round of 
medical torture, without the least benefit or change in his 
symptoms. He got gradually worse, and was on the point 
of death, when the pain in his chest was relieved by the 
simple means of hot water applied by a hydropathist, and 
he was thus enabled to take a journey to Malta, thence to 
