The Sun.
London, England, 1866-12-03 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF T

JOURNALS.

TIMES.—The case of " Hunter v. Sharpe," in
which a verdict for the plaintiff with nominal da-
mages was returned on Saturday by a special jury
in the Court of Queen's Bench, is one of equal im-
portance to the press and to the medical profession.
The advertising system described by Mr. Barnum
in his celebrated autobiography has been carried to
greater lengths by quack doctors and vendors of
patent drugs than by any other class, and is, we
fear, on the increase. The reason is obvious enough.
The laws of health and disease are at once the most
obscure and the most deeply interesting to the pub-
lic of all scientific principles. High authorities are
known to differ upon many of them, and there is
scarcely one of which the proper application is not
disputed ; yet it is certain that upon conformity to
them, whatever they may be, the happiness of our
lives and our prospects of longevity must in a great
degree depend. Iu all ages, therefore, quackery has
dogged the path of medicine, and it must be con-
fessed that to empiricism, which is but a milder
name for quackery, we owe some of the most valu-
able hygienic discoveries. While the wisest and most
eminent physicians are compelled to rely more on
experience than on theory we cal-mot wonder that
ignorant practitioners contrive to attract patients.
Most people, and especially those who have never
felt illness before, are predisposed to regard its
symptoms as something mysterious, and to put con-
fidence in specifics and sovereign cures. Now, this
is just the point of divergence between quackery
and medical science. Science may often be unable
to divine the causes of disease or to explain the ope-
ration of remedies, but it justly distrusts and is per-
fectly competent to expose the pretensions of those
who profess to remove constitutional maladies by
local treatment. The pathology of pulmonary
consumption may admit of some doubt, but we
know quite enough to justify us in suspecting
any one of imposture who should undertake
to cure it by a short cut. The aspect
of the case would be greatly aggravated if he
should publish advertisements representing trifling
ailments or sensations compatible with perfect
health as sure indications of that fatal complaint,
with the view of terrifying nervous readers into con•
suiting himself. Such things, indeed, are done every
day, and it would be difficult to estimate the amount
of positive injury, as well as mental pain, which is
thus inflicted. Persons in a certain rank of life
generally have a regular medical attendant, to whose
advice they would have recourse if anything were
amiss with them. A much larger class, however,
never think about their health until they experience
serious pain or discomfort, and are then quite at a
loss to whom they should apply. In this condition
they light on a paragraph in a newspaper describing
with terrible accuracy all that they have either felt
or apprehended, confirming their very worst fears
as to the probable result, and ending, of course,
with a puff of some drug or curative process as
affording the sole hope of relief. It is well for the
unfortunate dupe if he, is only induced by these
means to buy and swallow a few battles of medi-
cine which may be harmless. The greater danger
is that he should be frightened into a' personal in-
terview with the advertiser, who from that moment
acquires a direct pecuniary interest in playing on
his credulity. Such was the nature of the charge
made by our evening contemporary, the Pall-mall
Gazette, against Dr. Hunter, a gentleman whose
name was already known to the public. It appears
from his own account that the plaintiff had obtained
a diploma as M.D. at New York when he was no
more than twenty years of age, and had since prac-
tised with success in the United States and in
Canada. In 1864, for reasons which he failed to
make very clear, he came to this country, in igno-
rance, as he alleges, of the fact that he could not
be registered as a medical practitioner upon his
American and Canadian diplomas. Disdaining to
pass the requisite examination, he thereupon re-
solved to dispense with registration, and published
a work on consumption, the greater part of which
was reproduced in a series of advertisements in-
serted in our own columns and those of other jour-
nals. The general purport of these advertisements;
composed with considerable literary skill, was to
expound, or rather to shadow forth, a new theory
of the disease, which, according to Dr. Hunter,
consists mainly in a deterioration of the respiratory
organs by an excess of carbon, and can only be
reached effectually by inhalation upon a method of
his own. They contained, moreover, emphatic warn-
ings against neglect of premonitory symptoms,
among which very common and slight affections
were enumerated, and they embodied letters from
grateful patients who owed their lives to Dr. Hun-
ter. it was upon these extracts from Dr. hunter's
book, and upon the impropriety of thus advertising
for medical practice, that our contemporary eom-
mented in an article headed " Impostors and
Dupes," which appeared on the 10th of November
last year. The writer singled, out Dr. Hunter as
the representative of a system which he denounced
as one which no " reputable physician" would adopt,
designating those vibe, do so as " scoundrels, who
utter this base, forged coin," doubtless iu allusion
to the assumption in England of a title based on a
foreign medical degree. These words formed the
chief ground of Dr. Hunter's action against the
printer of the Pall-mall Gazette. The defendant,
so far from retracting them, pleaded a justification,
and alleged further that, even if the article were in
some respects inaccurate, it did not transgress the
limits of fair and reasonable criticism. We can-
not but think that a great part of the evidence sub-
mitted on both sides was irrelevant to the real ques-
tion at issue. A breach of professional etiquette is
one thing ; an act of imposture is another.
When Mr. Karslake remarked that a barrister
would lose caste by parading in the newspapers
the gratitude of 'felons whom he might have
got off he seems to have overlooked this dis-
tinction. It might be very proper to exclude the
offender from the circuit-mess, but it does not fol-
low that he should be called a scoundrel in print
with impunity.
i So, again, as the Lord Chief Jus-
tice pointed out, t is not material whether Dr. Hu-
nter's views as to their carbonaceous, quality of
" tubercles" and their dispersion by the direct ap-
plication of oxygen are consistent with those of
orthodox physicians. It was the weakness of the
defendant's case that not only does consumption
vary infinitely with individual constitutions, but
that no general treatment of it can be specified upon
which orthodox physicians have not disagreed
among themselves. It was, for instance, the re-
ceived doctrine some twenty years ago that a re-
laxing atmosphere was most favourable to the
recovery of consumptive patients ; but subsequent
experience, we believe, has greatly modified this
opinion. Inhalation, too, was very much in vogue
at one time, but Dr. Williams tells us that he has
been led by degrees to distrust its efficacy. It may
have shown great ignorance, to say the least, on
Dr. Hunter's part, that he should have attempted
to appropriate, and should have recommended as
an all but infallible remedy, one ion; familiar to all
physicians, but somewhat obsolete. It certainly
showed great presumption to speak with contempt
of all recognised modes of treatment, and to claim
the power of curing by a secret of his own what in
the hands of physicians like Dr. Williams would be
incurable. Nor can it be denied that several pas-
sages quoted from his work, whether they involve
scientific absurdities or not, are eminently calculated
to mystify the popular mind, and to produce on a
critic the impression of charlatanry. Still, all this
falls short of proving criminal imposture, and it is
not impossible, as Mr. Coleridge suggested, that
Harvey and Jenner may have equally out-
raged the professional prejudices of their own
day. It is not, however, recorded of these
great discoverers that they prefixed to their works
prefaces written by their own paid' assistants,
in the assumed character of independent judges con-
verted to the new system, or that they appended
thereto notices of the places and hours at which
they might be consulted. It was probably such cir-
cumstances as these, coupled with the apparent de-
sign to excite needless alarm for the purpose of
decoying patients, which led the jury to a conclusion
more satisfactory to the defendant than to Dr.
Hun-
ter. A verdict for the plaintiff with one farthing
damages implies a belief on their part that although
the law was violated there was every possible excuse
for its violation. We should fail in our duty if we
did not express the conviction that such a verdict
entirely meets the justice of the case, and that our
contemporary is entitled to the thanks of the public
for a courageous attempt to protect their interests.

THE AMERICAN PRESS.
THE SOUTHERN TRANSFORMATION.
The New York Times, which has for the last year
steadily and faithfully represented the optimist view
of the prospects of Southern society—preached up
the good sense and resignation of the Southerners,
and drawn glowing pictures of the field offered by
the Southern States either to Northern labour or
Northern capital—came out lastweek with a mourn-
ful confession that it has been all wrong ; that the
South is not a good field either for investment or
for emigration ; that few capitalists have taken their
money there ; that those who have are bringing it
away again ; and that as to emigrants, although the
tide rushes into the North-west in greater volume
than perhaps ever before, the labourers who go to
the South may alniost be counted on one's fingers.
As most men who had ever seriously considered the
causes which lead capital to flow into a country, or
which drive it out of a country, have foreseen this
result ever since the South began, after the close of
the war, to exhibit its real temper, the admission
of the Times does not add.much to our knowledge,
and will cause very few people much surprise.
Most of us knew, long before Andrew 494§44

and his "policy" had been heard of, that to direct
capital into a country, or make emigrants seek homes
in it, it is 'not enough that its climate be mild cr its
soil fertile or its water privileges numerous. Some
of the most fertile countries in the world, the most
blessed in " sun and soil and station," are the least
productive, the most scantily peopled, the most
miserable. European Turkey might be the garden
of Europe. There is probably no spot of earth,
unless it be the prairies of Illinois, which offers the
farmers so rich a yield with so little labour as the
great plains of Southern Russia, and of Moldavia
and Wallachia, and they contain less than a tenth
of the population which they might maintain. The
idea of emigrating to them would, however, be
laughed at by the most hardly pressed peasant of
the western countries, though land were offered him
for nothing. It has never been found possible for
the Russian Government to direct into its vast and
fertile voids even a driblet of the German emigration,

although they lie within a few hours of the German
frontier. German emigrants, let them be ever so
phlegmatic and ever so unenterprising, will face
three thousand miles of ocean and as many miles
of wilderness sooner than get within the clutches
of Russian judges and Russian police and Russian
drill sergeants. In fact, we will not say the one
thing that au emigrant desires—but the great thing,
the thing without which all other things are but a
mockery and a snare—is security against all dangers
except those against which he can guard by his own
courage or address. Men will face wild beasts,
swollen rivers, trackless forests, disease, hunger,
and even the tacks of savages, but they will not
face bad government or a bad police—which is the
worst feature of bad government—or the hostility
of those on whom they have to depend for society
or protection or co-operation. It is evident to
everybody that the prosperity of the South
can only be restored by the aid of Northern
capital, or by such a long course of industry
and economy on the part of its own people as we
have no reason to expect. But one generation can-
not readily throw aside the habits of body and of
mind bequeathed to it by five or six generations of
ancestors. We hear now and then of Southerners
bred in idleness and luxury who are putting their
hands to the plough and working in their own fields;
but isolated cases of this kind will not regenerat
society, and we have yet to see whether gentlemen
who have been driven to manual labour by an abso-
lute want of the necessaries of life will continue
their industry long after the acquisition of a fair
supply of food and clothing. There were before
the war thousands of young Southerners of the
planting class who preferred--and their choice had
the approbation of their friends and of the public—
a life of poverty and dependence, of roistering,
gambling, and roving from one friend's table to
another, or a " shabby genteel" existence as doctors
and lawyers, to any career, however tempting it
might be pecuniarily, which would force them to
engage in commerce. A certain proportion of these
will, no doubt, now that labour is so much cheaper,
and that the necessity for buying the labourer has
passed away, take to farming, which they always
considered the only legitimate pursuit for a " gen-
tleman ;" and many of ttivm have, no doubt, saved
enough from the wreck of the war to furnish them
with a little capital. But the great body of them,
we may be sure, cannot and will not become in our
time the steady, saving, industrious men who raise
nations out of bankruptcy and sweep from the soil
the traces of fire and sword and flood. The South
has gone through a great social revolUtion, it is
true ; but no great change—no such change in the
character of a people as would be necessary to
make the Southern men the restorers of their own
ruined fortunes—has ever been witnessed in one
generation. We can emancipate the negro, but we
cannot make his master, by a stroke of the pen or
stroke of the sword, a thrifty, hard-working, inge-
nious, persevering member of a " free society."
Expectations of this kind have been fostered be
rattle-brained correspondents of some of the news-
papers which support the President's " policy" and
are anxious to show that Southern facts support
Mr. Johnson's theories, and by " Southern gentle-
men" of a literary turn who have taken of late to
writing " moderate" and pseudo-philosophical let-
ters to Northern journals ; but no such expecta-
tions have any basis either in history or in human
nature. Even individual character changes
slowly ; the character of communities more slowly
still, and only under the long-continued applica-
tion of a new class of motives and of influences.
The French peasant of this year is a very different
man from the peasant of 1766 ; but it is not the
abolition of the monarchy or the overthrow of the

noblesse which has made him so ; it is seventy years
of proprietorship, of equality, of security. That
Southern character has,as yetundergone no essential
modification we infer with confidence from the fact
that, in spite of the poverty and desolation of the
country, there is no evidence of any general desire
to receive intelligent labourers from other countries,,
or any kind of labour except the least productive—
that is, brute labour. Men who think, who have
ambition, and who have ideas, aspirations, and
theories, and who seek a higher standard of living—
the kind of men, in short, who make modern society
what it is at the North, in Prussia, and in France and
England, and who are the great creators of wealth,
are not only not encouraged to come, but, when
they do come, are subje3ted to espionage and sur-
veillance at least—or, in other words, to those very
vexations which make intelligent men leave despotic
countries—and often to violence and outrage, which
are infinitely more terrible than the worst persecu-
tions of a despotic police. Most men, and all women,
would far sooner run the risk of being tried by a
military court and put in Spandau or Spielberg for
wearing a particular kind of cockade, or for reading
a particular book, than to go to bed every night in
fear of murder and arson at the hands of a mob
composed of their own neighbours. Now the state
of public feeling at the South, on which this policy
of its people is based, is the same state of feeling
which prevailed before the war, and there can
be no better proof that it is not the result
of passing circumstances, but flows from the very
character of the people, than the fact, that slavery,
which formerly furnished the excuse for it, has
completely disappeared. There is one other inci-
dent of Southern life which, trifling as it may seem,
is not without value as an indication of character.
The amusements of a people are often the very best
sign we can have of their tone of thought, and of
the ideas on which their manners are based. The
Spanish bull-fight is a very good index of Spanish
civilisation. The horse-race and prize-ring give us
a very fair notion of the stage of the progress
reached by the English people as a whole. We
have in the theatre and restaurant a key to the
average Frenchman's philosophy of life. And we
think we are not very far wrong when we say that
we have in the revival of " tournaments" all over
the South, which we now witness, an excellent
measure of the amount of real progress which the
people has made since the war or through the war.
It is possible for a matured and highly civilised
community to love out-door amusements. There is
nothing in tilting at a ring, cutting apples with a
sword, or leaping hurdles on horseback, to lead one
to doubt either the culture or the good sense of the
community which practises them. But any country
in which it is the custom, in our day, to assemble in
great crowds to watch men doing these things in
broad daylight, in the midst of great public distress,
dressed up in fantastic costumes, and calling them-
selves " disinherited knights," " knights of the
sword," " knights of the lone star," and pretending
to worship a young woman from a modest wooden
house in the neighbourhood as the " queen of love
and beauty," and to regard the bestowal of a shabby
theatrical coronet by her as the summit of earthly.
felicity, we need not have the least hesitation in pro-
nouncing semi-civilised as still in a stage much be-
hind what a distinguished French writer calls a
" vrai peuple moderne." And the instant revival of
this custom after the close of the war we regard as
a very strong argument against the notion that
Southern society has undergone any real transfor-
mation—any such transformation as to warrant the
expectation that it will henceforward tread the path
of progress, moral and material, abreast with our-
selves. We think, on the contrary, that every year
that we persist in believing, or in acting as if we
believed, that the war has wiped out all differences
between the North and South, and made the latter
in all respects as we are, save in her poverty, the
proofs of our mistake will accumulate, and we shall
see at last that the real regeneration of the South
means something more than letting the South alone.
We have now, as the first, last, and greatest of our
duties, to provide Southern society with security, as
the very basis not simply of liberty, but of civilisa-
tion. We must have security for the blacks, for
Northern men, for men of all shades of opinion. If
it be difficult at first to provide it, we must stay
there till it is provided—until Southern men them-
selves get used to it and have acquired the habit of
it, until political or religious or social dissent ceases
to expose a man to violence, or contumely, or
insult. It may take a long time to do this, but do
it we must. And if we shirk doing it, there is every
reason to fear that some years hence we may find
ourselves face to face with a problem like that
offered by Ireland or Jamaica, the reclamation of a
moral and material wilderness, from which capital
has fled, in which industry has died out, in which
literature is extinct or barbarous, art almost un-
known, science powerless, invention barren, life
insecure, and property worthless.—The New York
Nation.

TROUBLE FOR. HEAD CENTRES.
It is said that a lawyer in Boston is engaged in
endeavouring to collect the moneys that were paid
for bonds of the " Irish Republic," and that he
says that the parties who issued them are personally
responsible for the amounts. This matter is of con-