“Courageous, then, must be the knight who sets his lance in 
rest to tilt against the windmills of the world. 
“Nevertheless, although the truth is still banned by common 
consent, or tacit connivance,—whichever term you prefer,—as 
“heterodox,” in view of the cataclasm which must naturally en¬ 
sue, with deadly financial results to the innocents of orthodoxy, 
so soon as the long-trusted barriers of plausible and pretentious 
mystery and importance shall be swept away by the rising tide of 
popular indignation, when the masses become educated to dis¬ 
criminate between truth and falsehood and thus shall come into 
their own way. 
“Still, I say, there are, and have been all along the way, em¬ 
inent medical men of high intelligence, who, unlike the drones 
of the medical hive, have dared to think for themselves and have 
even dared to speak their thoughts. 
“Thus Sir William W. Gull, for instance, Physician to her 
late Majesty Queen Victoria, ‘ Having passed the period of the 
goldheaded cane and horsehair wig, we dare hope to have also 
passed the days of pompous emptiness ; and furthermore, we can 
hope that nothing will be considered unworthy the attention of 
physicians which contributes to the saving of 
life.’ 
“Again, an authority of the first rank, Prof. Oesterlin, says 
in his noted work on the Materia Medica:— 
“ ‘The studious physician of our century will hardly expect 
to accomplish by force, through some strange drug or other, that 
which only nature can bring about when assisted by all the ra¬ 
tional accessories of hygiene and dietetics .’ 
“ ‘ N a t u r e alone can furnish much de¬ 
sired and beneficient means, which the 
science of medicine never has afforded and 
never can.* 
“As we survey the civilization of our age and its medical 
science, we see, on the one hand, the crude superstitions of the 
masses, the subtler superstitions of the educated classes; gross 
materialism, bewildering Darwinism, pessimism, and degenerate 
political economy; on the other hand, unmitigated quackery and 
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