A BRIEF HISTORY OF MEDICINE. 11 
barbers of London a monopoly of eight miles in and around 
the capital in which to practise the art of Chirurgery, as it was 
then termed. Some time after, the first college for the training 
of students was founded ; then the surgeons united medication 
to their practice, and from this it may be termed modern 
beginning, there sprang the numerous halls of learning that 
flourish in every civilised land. It is interesting to follow 
this history step by step down the stream of time, but space 
forbids us to do more than note the important changes as they 
were introduced. The one which may be regarded as the 
greatest and inits pernicious effects the most to be lamented of 
all changes, ancient or modern, was the introduction of minerals 
and poisonous acids prepared from them by a noted empiric 
named Paracelsus, who has been justly termed the ‘‘ Prince of 
Quacks.”” This man (or arrogant fool) burned the books of 
his medical predecessors, declaring that he would follow no 
man, as he counted himself wiser than them all. It would 
have been a blessing for humanity if the doctors had treated 
his mischievous teachings in the same manner by burning 
them. The many thousands whose systems have been ruined 
by mercury, falsely termed medicine, will rise in judgment 
against him, for it was this man that caused the faculty at 
first to introduce into the human stomach that slow but sure 
poison, promising health and long life to all his followers. He 
himself only lived about 40 years, his own early death denying 
his false system of mineralisation. Notwithstanding the inroads 
of mineral medication the common people, and even some of the 
doctors, had not lost faithinsimple botanicremedies. Reading an 
old medical dictionary of over 100 years ago, it is pleasing to see 
that three-fourths of all it recommends is from the vegetable 
kingdom. In country districts the old and experienced 
mothers were the family physicians, whose stores werereplenished 
from the fields around. Except in cases of extreme sickness and 
approaching death, a doctor was seldom seen in the villages. 
At the beginning of our present century two*new schools 
of medicine were started, which have proved thorns in 
the side of the allopathists (whose creed means we cure 
