16 THE NEW ZEALAND FAMILY HERB DOCTOR. 
not been pleasant, Iadmit, but it is for you, my survivors, to 
carry on the good work.” Four years ago, while in Boston, 
the grave of this great but little known man was shown to us. 
The principal charges that Thompson brought against the 
doctors were the then almost uniform treatment or 
maltreatment of bleeding. This inhuman practice was 
carried out to such an extent that it is said by eye-witnesses 
that the floors of the free dispensaries were sometimes covered 
with blood resembling a battle-field. Acting on the principle 
and teaching of Thompson, some of the doctors started the 
new school, which they termed the eclectic or reformed 
practice of medicine. One of the leaders was Dr. Beach, who 
was not manly enough to give Thompson the honour of his 
discoveries, but instead ridiculed and abused him. Thompson 
never claimed to be an educated man, and it makes Dr. Beach 
rather small in the eyes of honest herbalists to vaunt over a 
mistake of Thompson’s in reference to anatomy. Thompson 
had said that the gall-duct emptied into the stomach, when 1t. 
in fact emptied into the duodenum, sometimes called the second 
or smaller stomach. About fifty years ago Dr. Coffin came 
over to England and introduced the botanic system, pure and 
simple. His Botanic Guide to Health has -passed through 
some 60 editions. Itis a good work, but is sold at a price 
above its commercial value. For seeing its author and family 
have made princely fortunes out of it, we fail to see that its 
price should be so high, namely 6/- in England, where books 
of a similar kind are sold at 2/6. Dr. Coffin was a fine speci- 
men of man, not only physically, as his portrait shows, but in 
manner. We are often told by some of our customers who 
have consulted him, that he was a gentleman. In one of his 
lectures he tells how he was converted to herbalism. He was 
a bound apprentice to an old-school doctor, and having a 
natural taste for the medical calling, was prospering, and 
would doubtless have shone, even as a regular, but, to the 
grief of his parents, he took ill and rapidly developed con- 
sumptivesymptoms. A terrible cough, emaciation and bleeding, 
from the lungs led to the conclusion of galloping consumption. 
