The herald., 1896-08-30
PROFESSIONAL
MISTAKES
How the Doctors Confound
Cause and Effect
Rediscovery of a Lost Art as Old
as the Patriarchs
An Interesting Interview With Man Who
Traced q Truth to Its Source and Dis
Covered a Great Principle Long Neg
Iected.

20 mush quackery as in the United
States. In no country in the world are
the mass of the people more credulous
| in regard to the possibilities of curing
the ills from which they suffer by mys-
! terious remedies or processes of which
! the patients know nothing, and tht
! physicians who administer them under
stand little more. A pyramid of impos-
ing dimensions might be constructed oi
the patent-medicine bottles that art
| purchased every year by the trusting
| American public. The newspapers oi
| the country derive a considerable por-
| tion of their revenue from the glarina
advertisements of these remedies, in
which the most impossible promises OF
cures are made.
The ignorance of the average Ameri-
can-even of those who consider them
selves well educated-in regard to the
construction and functions of the body
is as dense as it is lamentable. College
graduates who can tell you off-hand all
about the physical features of Central
Africa, or the distance from the earth
to the moon, frequently have but the
vaguest kind of an idea in regard to
the location and functions of the Or
gans of the body, upon whose perfect
performance of their duties is depend
ent mans well-being and power for
good.
THE ARMY OF QUACKS.
With such a condition of affairs gen.
orally prevailing, it is not surprising
that the country should be overrun by
thousands of unprincipled practition-
ers. seeking to traffic upon the miseries
and the credulity of the people. A
writer has truly said that man Is a
poor creature who shuffies through life
on three crutches. He entrusts his soul
to the charge of priest his earthly pos
sessions to the tender mercies of a law
yer, and his body to the experimental
researches of a physician. The schools
of medicine in the United States are
as numerous as the religious sects, and
like those sects they can see nothing
good in anything outside of their own
narrow confines. That doctors differ
is time e-honored proverb. How, in
the face of all these differences of opin-
ion in regard to the cause of diseases
and their remedies, can it reasonably
be claimed that medicine is an exact
science? While granting that marvel
Gus advances have been made in the
domain of surgery during the past
quarter of a century truth compels the
admission that, as far as the curing
of diseases is concerned, physicians are
little, if any. advanced beyond the days
of Pythagoras, who taught that ma
ture heals, not the physician"
DOCTORS AND DRUGS.
" hS 10 eilo 81. LtdF1HR aside the
subject of fraudulent quacks, let us
glance at the methods pursued by hon
oraple physicians of the regular school.
Although perhaps not to so great an ex-
tent as in former years, their reliance
is still chiefly upon the use of drugs
of mysterious compounds whose work.
ings within the body they can only Judge
by the results, which results have been
declared by many of the Oldest and
vn1r -;1lo l..
harmful In most cases than the disease
which they are intended to cure. Let
us see what few distinguished physi-
clans say about the art of healing by
means of drugs.
DR.. oliver Wendell Holmes, the we'll
known writer, who was professor of
anatomy in Harvard university, says:
The disgrace of medicine has been
that colossal system of self deception, in
obedience to which mines have been
emptied of their cankering minerals,
the entrails of animals taken for their
impurities, the poison bags of reptiles
drained of their venom, and all con-
ceivable absurdities thus obtained
thrust down the throats of human be-
ings suffering from some want of or
ganism, nourishment or vital stimula-
tion." Again. "if all the drugs were cast
into the sea it would be so much better
fishes"
DIR. A. O'Leary, Jefferson Medical col
lege, Philadelphia, says: 1.-The best things
in the healing art have been done by those
who never had diploma. 4 asteur has
no diploma, and has done more good than
all the M. DIS in France. Ether as an
anesthetic was not discovered by doc
tor" etc.
The distinguished Sir John Forbes is
quoted in the British and Foreign Med
ical Review: I'm a large proportion of
cases treated by allopathic physicians
the disease is cured by nature and not
by them, consequently, in considerable
proportion of diseases it would fare as
we'll or better with the patients If all
remedies, at least active remedies, es-
pecially drugs, were abandoned"
Charles H. Fagge M. D., Fellow of
the College of Physicians and the Royal
Society of Physicians to one of the larg-
est hospitals of London, says: "All sys-
TENS of medicine are of necessity false.
and homeopathy are equally
BILE, not wrong solutions of
scientific problem, but ignorant an
swers to an absurd question:
DR.. Eliphalet Kimball of New Hamp-
shire was physician of the regular
school. In Thoughts on Natural Princi-
pies. he says: There is doctorcraft as we'll
as priestcraft Physicians have slain
more than war"
Prof. Alonzo Clark of the New York
College of Physicians and Surgeons
says: I'm. their zeal to do good physi-
clans have done much harm. They have
hurried thousands to the grave who
would have recovered if left to nature"
Prof. Baker of the New York Medical
College says: Drugs which are admin
istered in scarlet fever kill more pa
tients than the disease does
John Mason Good, M. D., F. r. S., says:
''The effect of medicines on the human
system are in the highest degree uncer-
tain, except, indeed, that they have de-
stroyed more lives than war, pestilence
and famine combined
James Johnson. M. D.. f. r. S.. editor
of the Medico Surgical Review, says:
Il declare as my conscientious convic-
ton. founded on long experience and
reflection that if there were not single
list, apothecary, druggist nor drug on the
face of the earth there would be less NOR
tality than now prevails"
Majendie, the celebrated physician and
in lecture, says: Let
me tell you what / did as physician It
the Hotel Dieu, where some three or four
thousand patients passed through my
hands every year. Dividing them into
l followed dispen-
sary and gave the usual medicine; Sec
ond class, bread pills and water; third
class, nothing whatever. Third class
but got well. Second class next,
as they did not rely wholly on nature
The mortality was greatest among those
who were drugged according to the dis