EDITORIAL OBSERVATIONS. 
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confines of innumerable discoveries, from the earliest period of their 
history, were familiar, even in ante-Christian ages, with modes of treat¬ 
ment and remedial agents which have only found their way into 
European practice within the last thirty years. Acupuncture, which 
was not known in Europe till towards the close of the last century, is 
described in the ancient medical works of China as an established mode 
of treatment among them ; while in India and Japan it has long ranked 
as one of the ordinary surgical applications, and is effected by means of 
very slender and sharply pointed gold or silver needles, specially adapted 
for the purpose. The word moxa .,which is now sufficiently familiar to British 
surgeons as a species of actual cautery, is the Chinese name of the plant 
whose dried leaves were originally employed by them in this process. It 
would appear, however, from Herodotus, that a similar mode of treat¬ 
ment was also, practised among the nomadic tribes of ancient Libya, who 
had the habit of applying greasy wool to the heads or temples of their 
young children, and burning holes into the flesh, under the idea that the 
process was specially well adapted to prevent colds in the head, and to 
induce general vigour of body. 
“ In regard to anaesthetics, the ancients knew far more than was known 
to modern nations till within the last quarter of a century, for the 
Egyptians and Greeks were acquainted with several substances which 
had the property of inducing insensibility to pain, by plunging those who 
partook of them into a lethargic sleep. 
“The mandragora , which is now banished from the materia medica , was 
used by the old Greek and Roman physicians ; and Galen, Aretseus, 
Celsus, and others, ascribe to it strong soporific properties ; while other 
writers, as Dioscorides and Pliny, state that those drinking a sufficient dose 
of it are rendered insensible to the pain of the surgeon’s knife and the 
cautery. The Crusaders brought back from the east a knowledge of the 
hachisch; and in the middle ages an infusion of mandragora was given 
to patients who were to undergo painful operations, in the same manner 
as it had been administered by the ancients, the effect being to produce 
a deep sleep, which rendered the patient wholly insensible to pain. 
Boccaccio, who wrote in the middle of the fourteenth century, relates 
that a celebrated surgeon of the faculty of Salerno, named Mazet, em¬ 
ployed a soporific, obtained by distillation, to deaden the pain of opera¬ 
tions ; while the confraternity of thieves and highwaymen of that age 
were said to be acquainted with a secret means of rendering themselves 
insensible to the torture of the rack; according to the account given of 
it in Le Brun’s ‘Civil and Criminal Processes,’ published in 1647, soap 
was the agent employed, this substance having, as was asserted, the 
property of ‘ stupyfying the nerves.’ 
“ If we pass to other presumed novelties in medicine, whose beneficial 
effects, unlike those of anesthetics, are mere matters of individual opinion, 
we still find older claimants to the title of inventors than those to whom 
we commonly ascribe the merit. Thus, for instance, we are assured by 
M. B. de Xivrey, that Paracelsus forestalled Hahnemann’s system, by 
teaching that ‘ like should be treated by like, since like attracts like.’ 
Avicenna, too, was in advance of the German doctor in another funda¬ 
mental principle of homoeopathy, for he treated diseases by administering 
infinitesimal doses of the deadliest poisons. According to some authorities, 
the great Descartes killed himself from too rigid an adherence to the 
homoeopathic doctrine that a disease should be treated by those agents 
which will produce analogous symptoms, for when he was attacked by a 
raging fever he insisted upon taking large and repeated doses of alcohol— 
a mode of treatment which brought on violent hiccoughing, and speedily 
terminated in death. 
“ The kindred system of hydropathy must necessarily, in its simpler 
