1~/ 'iTHE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. •:£>} > fc> . ;v ; v A WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. AN APPEAL TO SIR BENJAMIN HALL AND THE BRITISH PEOPLE. ISY JAMES JOHN GARTH WILKINSON, M.D. AUTHOR OF " THE HUMAN BODT AXD ITS COXN'EXIOS WITH MAN." Pro civibus servandis. LONDON : ROBERT THEOBALD, 2G, PATERNOSTER ROW. W. HEADLAND, 15, PRINCES STREET, HANOVER SQ. ; AND 39, KING'S ROAD, BRIGHTON. \. 1354. 1%54- pd^ mo- \+%lo J no ,3 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. Sir, and my Countrymen, Public casualties open the world's heart and eyes, ensure the progress of decent fairness, bring mankind to book, to facts, and to its Maker, and clear away at a heavy, although at the least cost, the obstructions which detain us from better days. The measure of the evil to be got rid of, is given in the weight and stripes of the rod that is used. The present rod is pestilence, the number of whose lashes is not yet complete. For what crime, or for what purpose, is the infliction laid on ? There cannot be a doubt that sin is the effectual caller of all misery, and that the cholera is a consequence of our sins. These sins however are of many kinds, and it is not about those which have a simply religious bearing that I am going to speak. Physical and medical sins, acknowledged as such in the sight of God also, are those which I shall try to bring home to you, in order that their special repentance, and a regeneration thereafter, may be ensured. Other repentances are urged by other appointed voices, and to them also let us respond, Amen. 15 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. The British nation, like every other in Christendom, contains within it many solid and compact organizations which have come from old times, and which have well nigh all power in several great departments of action and thought. Among these are the professions, medical, clerical, legal, and many others. Huge social fortresses, they stand above the interests of individual houses, nominally for protection and defence. Yet there is not one of them but supports a continual siege against its own times and peoples ; and what is termed reform is always accompanied by the razing of some part of their outworks, or of the very citadels themselves. Each fortalice is taken up by turns, and becomes the subject of an indispensable providential assault ; the immediate cause of which is some calamity, or hard necessity, which identifies these towers of the past with our straitness, our evils, and our sins ; and preaches a brave, God-fearing self-reliance, and a fresh appeal to the sword of our spirits in the great Battle of Facts. The medical profession, Avith its black innumerable donjons, is at present brought, by the benignant pestilence, into clear opposition with the interests of man; and it is to summon you into the ranks of the human powers arrayed against it, that my duty now takes up its otherwise unwilling pen. The medical profession, as such, is confessedly powerless in the presence of cholera. Medical science itself has the disease in its most virulent form. l\"ot a remedy keeps upon its irritable stomach from day to day. There is no power of holding any thinghealing, but the whole Pharmacopoeia rushes with noisome vclocitv through this miserable art. Con- 2 OLD PHYSIC HAS THE CHOLERA. vulsed and blue-cold, half death and half physic, it chatters out its horrible statistics. In place of a fountain of health, it is, in science, the focus and epitome of the pestilence of the time. And if it is ill to death in this wise, agreeing in its several members upon no remedy, but spasmodic toward all, and keeping to none for even successive hours, what is the state of its patients all over the world ? According to Government figures, one half die, and the other half struggle back into life through more or less difficult convalescence. Clearly then there is no evidence that medicine plays any other Dart than a destructive one in its relation to cholera, or that it is any other than a violent indecent way of disturbing inevitable death-beds, and doing worse han nothing. That such is the fact there can be no doubt. A short consideration of the predisponents and chances n cholera will convince us of it. Whenever cholera s coming out, and patches of country or of city are ncluded in its spots, whatever weakens the human organism, and lowers the tone and harmony of health, >redisposes the body to its reception. Some populaions are at their weakest in summer heat, and then cholera takes them : others are below the high level of a sustained vitality in the long and stunting winter snows, and then they belong to the cholera : bad food, fear, sorrow, debauchery, sad early mornings after uproarious nights, bad conscience, filth, malaria, effluvia, — all these, and every conceivable depressant, throws down its prey into the pits of cholera, and makes recovery nearly hopeless. Aye, and when the attack occurs, the fight for life is on the same field b 2 3 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. of natural chances. If artificial depressants in the shape of drugs are poured into the system, the opportunities of life are still further contracted. Especially is this the case with opium, brandy, and stimulants, which, where they fail to relieve, superadd most rapid exhaustion of their own : a fact well known to the medical profession ; and this exhaustion occurs at a time when every seed and grain of force is wanted by life to conduct the struggle. Is it not then clear that the statistics of cholera might be improved, by simply leaving out the old medical profession ? Sir, and my Countrymen ! they have a shrewd suspicion of this themselves, and accordingly, to their honor though not their glory, in all public considerations and recommendations they have tended very much to leave themselves out. The profession, true to the malady which it has, to get rid of its drugs, has betaken itself to the sewers. God forbid that I should not honor the social office of the scavenger, — from the adjutant birds of Calcutta to the ediles of Rome, they are purveyors of a cleanliness which makes their adventitious dirt into dignity ; but then hitherto they and the medical profession, though communicants and friends, are something apart. And no patient on his bed of sickness was ever attended before by a professed scavenger, even though Cincinnatus were the man. That time has now, hoAvever, come ; and our cholera-doctors employ no treatment in which they confide, but the treatment by draining. If cholera rages, call in the whitewasher, call in the gully-hole trapper, call in the drain-maker, call in the chloride of lime maker, the butcher, baker, publican, and the rapid shell and I THE DOCTORS DESERTING PHYSIC. coffin maker, — and let the scrap and remnant of the office of the medical man be, to be the caller ! No profession ever underwent a more sheer self-abrogation. Don't let me be misunderstood. Prevention is better than cure; and the arts of prevention are noble arts. Is the medical profession, then, to have no arts of prevention? it has vaccination against small pox ; what has it of the kind against cholera ? The drainage prevention, the clothing and food prevention, and the thousand scaffoldings that support the great arising palace of human health, in the presence of disease, the unbuilder, are the contribution of numerous other callings, and do not await the impertinent call of any single profession. As the fireengines come by their own natural guides to a house on fire, so do these necessities to the society which wants them. But what we want from the medical man is the medicine-prevention, and no irrelevant recommendation to the navigator, the plumber, or the mason. Yet these parties, in cholera, are literally the M.D. of which the doctors are the jog-trot apothecary. That such a prevention exists, I shall shew you in the sequel; but the present point is, that if the medical man knows nothing of any safeguard of the kind, he has quitted his post, to which thenceforth others must be appointed. Nursed and reared in and to the medical profession, there is a rapidly growing set of dissentients called the Homoeopaths, who alone offer to occupy the place which the " infallible" profession has ceded. Alive with faith born of experience, standing upon the everlasting and everliving rock of facts, they know that they have medical or healing powers equal to 5 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. the emergency of pestilence, and are willing to put them to the proof on fair terms of trial, such as will secure their own independency of action so far as this is necessary to a successful issue. They have printed and published all this, and from their little housetop have cried it aloud with all their might to all whom it concerns ; but they have cried to stopped ears and scornful faces. Let me here make an extract from a paper on cholera put forth by the British Homoeopathic Association, and which gives a few statistics in point, as follows :—: — TKEATED AT THEIR OWN HOUSES. Results of Allopathic or ordinary treatment of Cholera. Cfise3. Deaths. At Tischnowitz, in Moravia 331 ... 102 ? Wishncy, Wototschok, in Russia 199 ... 139 ? Merseburg 164... 101 ? Raab, In Hungary 1217 ...578 In various Cavalry Regiments in Great Britain 171 ... 54 „ the Troops at Gibraltar 459 ... 131 ? the Troops at Nova Scotia and In ew Brunswick ... 210... 59 ? the Troops in Canada ... 356 ... 127 3107.. .1291 About one death in every 2 l-3rd cases, or more than 39 per cent. fiijsults of Ilomiropathie treatment of Cholera. Cases. Deaths. By Dr. Baer, at Prague 80 ... 0 „ Dr. Bakody, at Raab, in Hungary 154 ... 6 „ Dr.Duplat, at Marseilles. GO ... 12 „ Dr.Gerstel, at Tischnowitz, in Moravia 327 ...32 „ Dr.Hanusch,atTischnowitz 84... 6 „ Dr. Kliener, at Saratof, in Kussia 183 ... 27 „ Dr. Jal, at Marseilles 19 ... 4 „ Dr. Lederer, at Vienna . ... 80 ... 2 „ Dr. Lens, at Pesth 40... 8 „ Dr. Licliteufels, at Vienna 44 ... 3 „ Dr. LOvy, at Prague 80... 8 „ Dr. Marenzeller, at Vienna 80 ... 3 „ Dr. Mayer, at Pesth 65... 0 „ Dr. Quiu, at Tischnowitz and Paris 48... 8 „ Dr. Bummel, at Merseburg 46 ...16 „ Dr. Sohaller, at Prague ...113... 0 „ Dr. Schreter, at Lemberg 27... 1 „ Dr. Schultz, at Vienna .... 17... 0 „ Dr. Bolder, atWlshney,Wototschok, In Kussia 109 ... 23 „ Dr. Vrecka, at Vienna and SlowitZ 144 ... 12 „ Dr. Veitli, at Vienna 125 ... 3 1875.. .169 About one death out of 11 cases, or little more than 9 per Cent. [It is proper to mention, that these results must not be received without caution, on account of the variations in the intensity of the disorder at different 6 HOMOEOPATHY SUCCEEDS. TlJaces and periods. In a considerable degree, however, the Homoeopathic statements are supported by testimonials and acknowledgments from local authorities.] TEEATED IX HOSPITALS. Cases. Deaths. In the Dmmmond St. Cholera Hospital, Edinburgh ... 4GI ... 201 „ the Cholera Hospital, Berlin, under Dr. Biihr 97 ... 64 ? Krunkenburgs wards, at Halle 104... 53 „ Hamburg Hospitals, Oct. and Nov. ia3l 283... 178 ? the Cholera Hospital, St. Petersburgh, by Dr. Lichtenstadt 636 ... 317 „ the Hospital, Raab 284 ... 122 „ the Hospital, Bordeaux . 104... 72 1960.. .1097 About one death in 1 4-sth cases, or about 56 per cent. Cases. Deaths. By Dr. Fleischmann, at Vienna 732 ...244 Drs. Haynel and Stiller, at Berlin 32... 6 „ Dr. Mablt, at Bordeaux 31 ... « 795 ... 258 About one death in 3 1-1 Oth cases, or between 32 and 33 per cent. " From the above it will be seen that in private treatment the deaths under the Allopathic or ordinary method, were 39 per cent., and under the Homoeopathic, little more than 9 per cent. ; and that in hospitals it was 56 per cent, under Allopathy, against 32 or 33 per cent, under Homoeopathy ; an astounding difference in the first description of cases, and a very remarkable difference also in the latter, although it is to be borne in mind that patients are only brought to an hospital Avhen they shew undoubted evidence of the fully developed disease, many after having been subject to a very violent treatment, and having been dosed with Allopathic medicines, and many, of course, are brought in a dying state.* * " The Report of carefully authenticated cholera cases treated by the medical officers of the Edinburgh Homoeopathic Dispensary, from the 4th October, 1848, to the Ist February, 1849, received since the first publication of this Circular, gives the following results : — Cases. Cured. Deaths. Under treatment. 236 179 57 none. Proportion of deaths to cures, as one to three. " The Return of the General Board of Health of the total number of 7 " In Wilde's Austria, its Literary, Scientific, and Medical Institutions-^- it is remarked — ' Upon comparing the report made of the treatment of cholera in the Homoeopathic Hospital at Vienna, with that of the same epidemic in other hospitals of Vienna at a similar time, it appeared that while two-thirds of those treated by Dr. Fleischmann recovered, two-thirds of those treated by the ordinary methods in the other hospitals died. This very extraordinary result led Count Kolowrat (Minister of the Interior) to repeal the law relative to the practice of Homoeopathy.' The hospital in question, it should be added, was daily visited by two Allopathic inspecting physicians, appointed by the government. Dr. Roth, of Munich, also, who was sent by the Bavarian government to observe the cholera in different localities, and report on the effects of its Homoeopathic treatment, published in 1833 an interesting pamphlet, which has furnished a considerable portion of the statistics above detailed. The statistics from Tischnowitz, in Moravia, were furnished by the authoi'ities of that place, accompanied by a letter of the most grateful acknowledgment. Dr. Veith, one of the practitioners whose results are quoted in the above list, had formerly been a medical practitioner in the Allopathic school, but was at the time when the cholera raged at Vienna, Chaplain to the Court and to St. Stephen's Cathedral, and cases treated at Edinburgh and Leith during the same period, is as follows : — Cases. Cured. Deaths. Under treatment 876 271 546 59 Proportion of deaths to cures, as two to one. Or, supposing the cases treated Homceopathically, and which were duly reported to the authorities, to have been included in the General Return — their deductions would shew a proportion of deaths to cures of live to one under Allopathic treatment. f This is the work of an Allopathic surgeon, the talented editor of the Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medicine. 8 HOMOEOPATHY SUCCEEDS. whilst administering the consolations of religion to those nfected with cholera, he was shocked at the awful morality that prevailed ; and the idea of treating them according to the Homoeopathic system, with which he was already familiar, occurred to him. His success was so great, that of 125 patients he lost but three." Lit would be easy to add to the above lists similar suits from all the great towns of Europe and America during the late invasions of cholera ; but as one of the most certain and accessible, I commend you to the recent pamphlet by Dr. Charge of Marseilles, in which that physician shews the marked success, both for prevention and cure, which has attended the Homoeopathic means. In India also an amateur (see The British Journal of Homoeopathy, July, 1854), has treated 629 cases of cholera, and accompanies his results with admirable statistics : the gross ratio of deaths being 30 per cent. The same good results have attended Homoeopathic treatment in these past weeks in the Homoeopathic Hospital in Golden Square ; and also in the recent terrible attack of the pestilence at Barbadoes in the West Indies. One would have thought that facts like these, no alas marvellous in themselves, yet marvellously goot in contrast with the deadly zero of the doctors, wou have arrested the attention, and provoked the tria of all professors of the art of healing. One wou have thought that they would have deserted their o bog of failures, and tried the dry land to which Ho mceopathy invites them on every side. On the con trary, on they go from unsurety to unsurety, expe Cting in the same fruitless direction, and sedu avoiding every path that professes to lead awa b3 9 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. from their unsuccess. For this they have many pretexts. First, they deny all facts out of their own pale. Next, they deny in specie that the cases treated were cholera ; simply because the average of deaths was different from, their own. This is a very common dodge. They find that diseases under their plan have a certain mortality, and a certain duration ; and this rate of death and time they consider to be the law of nature, and not the condition of their own impuissance. Thus I have again and again found that cases of hooping-cough cut short, were straightway pronounced to be not hooping-cough, because under Homoeopathy they had not lasted six months — the proper Allopathic duration. So inflammation of the lungs was not rightly diagnosed — was not inflammation, because aconite and bryonia infinitesimals had cured it ; whereas the orthodox had barely cured a proportion of such cases by bleeding and mercury enough to kill. So that they have a ready way of limiting what can be done in disease to precisely what they can do. A very pretty teachableness for a progressive art. It reminds me of a man I met in Paris this autumn, to whom I told that I had gone to Bordeaux in a day of thirteen hours. He said it could not be Bordeaux — that I was mistaken. I stared. He told me that he had travelled hard a whole day from Paris to Orleans, which was a town about a fifth of the distance, and I must be mistaking Bordeaux for Orleans. Finding that he was a mystic, with his eyes open only into his own head, and not outwards, I mystified him still further by telling him that I had gone in a travelling town drawn by a huge tea-kettle with a coal-scuttle for my two horses. 10 FATAL DECREES. And now lie declared that I was mad. I found however reason to pity him : he was an old diligence proprietor who had lost his all by not being sharp in selling off his stock of lumber and horses when the railroad was coming : his ideas were fossils ; and he had crazed into a man who had lost the power of noting the ways of locomotives. So, methought, the medical profession is even like that old diligence proprietor. Hooping-cough ought to last six months — if alleged to be cured in less it is not hooping-cough ! Typhus ought to last six weeks — otherwise it is not typhus ! Pneumonia should be killed or cured by bleeding, blistering, calomel, &c, — if it be cured by Homoeopathy it is not pneumonia ! This is at all events a new form of diagnosis ; and if properly applied to cholera will annul all facts but those of the existing Allopathic mortality. The question is, will the people of Great Britain allow the hideous result to be fixed as the perpetual condition of disease ; or will it call in other healers ? Believe me, Sir, and my Countrymen, I should not now be boring your ears with either complaints or suggestions, if I could find any way to the audience chamber of this old medical profession with its mad conservatism. But there is no getting at it. Ensconced in its institutions, wrapped around with all their fur, and fed with all their fatness, it is a little Russia, or a little China in the heart and centre of our dominions. Every grand battle it loses is reported to it as a victory by its prime ministers, The Times, The Lancet, and The Athenceum : its disgraces are the occasions on which it distributes stars and garters from its seat of honor; if the Homoeopaths come 11 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. with an embassy to any of its outer gates, it proclaims in characters of crooked fists, "exterminate the barbarians, and let them be exterminated : away with the foreign devils." Nor does there appear to be anything but public opinion collaring and deposing it, that will bring their great Fee Fo Fum to the knowledge conveyed by the natural senses. Its mighty General, Whang Hum, commonly known as The Times, standing Lord High Commissioner to all orthodoxy which wishes to be hoaxed, laced Beadle of Fogydom, is bamboozled by it, and bamboozles it, as is the usual case with despots and their tools. Lately I endeavoured to be admitted to the presence of this big personage, but without the least success. I had carefully watched The Times to see whether or no it would, in the interest of the British Nation, give Homoeopathy a fair hearing when cholera was in our houses. Day after day it was full of letters about the pestilence, in which drainage, chloride of lime, and above all, castor oil, to which The Times is wedded, were freely admitted to occupy columns of the leading journal. One day, after the editors had been in the sewers and kennels for many weeks, stirring them up, — as I should have thought at rather an inconvenient time, — they, the editors, suddenly proclaimed that they had a sense of cleanliness, — moral cleanness — of the most delightful description, from the fact that in their public station, as moulding the opinions of millions, they had done their thorough duty, had given everything which offered a chance of healing, fair play, and were ever ready to lend the breadth of that sacred trust, their publicity, to every attempt however humble to alle- 12 MORAL FRAGRANCE OF THE TIMES. viate the dispensations of heaven, or to correct the pollutions of man. It seemed to me then as if the wedding guest had not on the wedding garment : as f the blanched skirts of The Times were not white with the light of innocence, but with the whitewash of a very rash presumption. About that very day, a ong letter upon the Fungoid Theory of cholera ap)eared in the journal, in which all that was mouldy was put in the large type of a leading article, and as sulphur kills fungi, it was recommended, though not very clearly how, to be applied to the roots of the matter. Now, thought I, The Times has got its occupation, to wander about dirty places with a brimstone dredging box, and pepper fungi, — The Times, the yellow powdered gentleman's gentleman, the Jeames of the medical clubs, — The Times in brimstone plush at last ! Finding it honest so far, yet quite oblique with regard to having done its duty — its two eyes, like a Chinaman's, where its ears ought :o be, with regard to all moral unity — I determined to write to it, and ask it about Homoeopathy. " Cain," whispered I, " where is thy brother ?" I wrote it the substance of this very paper which you are now reading, but would you believe it, though the mould and the mildew, and the fine flowers of sulphur, had been in its largest print — second only to its " decisive intelligence" of the fall of Sebastopol, — my facts and cures, and treatment, by Homoeopathy did not appear in print at all ! I had been led to anticipate as much. Of course many letters had been cushioned before mine. And then I was told, aut sense and duty would not let me off the trouble of writing on that account, that The Times was dead- 13 set against Homoeopathy, that they had a medical censor who threw out that article at all hazards : and somehow or other it has proved that the result is even so. I wonder at it ; yet I see The Times too well not to know that it shall one day advocate Homoeopathy, with all its joint stock trumpets, and all its tardy thunders. On this, as on every other great fact of the age, it will only be a few days after the fair. Sir, and my Countrymen ! is not the moral of all this, strange, old, and edifying ? Here is a grand perplexity of horrors, deaths by thousands and tens of ;housands in our cities, our villages, our fleets, and our armies ; the doctors at their wits' end, with all heir resources quite broken, — of most approved badless; the population, the medical profession, and the ournals, rushing about in panic-terror for something, anything, to stay the mischief; some looking into he air with microscopes after floating fungi and imps o be peppered, and have Times sulphur put upon heir tails ; some with wild uplifted faces imploring Hercules Chadwick to wash, flush, drain, and fume away the destroyer; some convulsively grasping at astor oil, and with angry convulsiveness throwing t away again : some in prayer, and all in despair : and yet the terror-stricken crowd will not for one moment look at the very only thing that pretends to )e somewhat of a sheet-anchor, that has been proved o be such in all lands under these fearful inflictions, jet us try all things in heaven and earth, and in the vaters under the earth, all things in sulphur and the )it of Orcus also — all things but Homoeopathy, .'his is just the case with every sinful state. The 14 MUST, CRUMPLED UP. Er is perfectly ready to cede everything but his fortress, his own nonsense, his own sin. The kard will regulate his diet to a nicety, wear his flannels by the best orders, breathe the purest air, go to bed in the best time, and to church also ; but he must have his drops : the damning facts he ought to listen to, the weight of common sense against them, oppress his senses, and choke his bad life, and he will not hear them. And so it is with the opposition to all truths that exact a central reform, and threaten the evil heart of a system. " Anything you please, gentlemen," saith The Times, "but such truths. Away with them, away with Homoeopathy." Pretexts of course are easily raised to shew how right and proper it is to blink the convincing- facts in avor of Homoeopathy, and to decide against it because it is at first sight improbable. They say that ;he principle of giving medicines that have the power of causing a disease similar to that to be cured, must though it does not) make people w r orse of their existing malady. Must is a mighty fellow, but often easily "crumpled up" by unceremonious practice. Experience is the prover and enlarger of all things, and possibilities and impossibilities are not body at all, but the last hairs on the tails of facts, following in the rear with the most dead obedience, and occupying in wisdom the hindermost place of all. The allegaion of the impossibility of Homoeopathy is then in every physical sense a kind of madness, and may be dismissed as such, and now let us attend to a second pretext, that the Homoeopathic means are "inadequate." The argument runs thus : Here is Mr. So and So, most near and dear to me, attacked by cho- 15 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. era: can I trust him to infinitesimal doses, which seem quite like doing nothing. The circumstances are terrible : the means of assistance look small indeed. First, how run the facts ? The old way of treatment, whose means looking formidably great, consisting of huge stores of drugs, many of them capable of producing instant effects of poison and death, unmistakeable signs of a certain power, loses professedly, as to day's Times states, (October 4th,) 35 out of 100 cholera cases. If this treatment, bulky and potential, be not inadequate, what is ? I have already shewn you that medicine here does not do nothing, only because it does mischief. The Homoeopathic treatment cures 70 out of the 100, or a larger proportion. Here the inadequacy is far less. Let me recall to you that power and violence are different things, but that violence and weakness are, for good ends, generally the same. ; Tis so in other things, why not in physic ? Medicine comes from medeo, the verb, I heal ; and no drug which is not healing in its application, is in those hands a medicine at all, much ess a powerful medicine. Moreover the dimensions of power are not weighed by scales, or told off on graduated bottles; but reckoned by deeds done. When I am called to an inflammation, I know that aconite and belladonna in billionths of a drop are a vast healing power, because I have cured, and daily do cure, formidable inflammations in their onset by these means. I look upon my little bottles as giants ; as words that shake great diseases to their marrows, and into their ashes ; and rid the whole man of a foe life-size. Away then with the bigness based on quantity, and which sits like a vulgar bully in the 16 GREAT ACQUAINTANCES. Ical shops : great cures determine the only greatwhich sick men, or their guardians, can recognize edicine. I dismiss this, of inadequacy, as being i reflection of the confusion of those with whom ?quacy is the everlasting luck. A third count in the medical brief against Homoeopathy remains to be noticed ; the allegation that its known success is due to Nature, and that it might profitably go even farther, and instead of giving infinitesimals give clejin nothing. It is remarkable that all these charges are true of the accuser — true of the old system of medicine. It would be better that it should do nothing, than fill the human constitution with poisons. But its recommendation to Nature is, to say the least, very suspicious. Like some doubtful character boasting of his acquaintance with lords and ladies at a great distance, and interspersing "My friend, the Duke " in his stories, the doctors talking, as they do, of that Dame, cause us to enquire how and when they have been honored with her familiarity. She is abroad in all weathers, mixing with the commonest people, and most conversible ; yet I have never heard of the doctors being with her. They have, it is true, dressed up a hat and feathers, and some old skirts reputed to have been hers, got surreptitiously from her butler, stuck them on a pole of their own, and called them vis medicatrix nature; and this Guy they have leeched, blistered, bled and calomeli zed in a manner that shewed at once that they thought they were playing with a bowelless costame : but this is the very nearest they have come to nature so far as my knowledge goes. The Dame herself has ordered them from her sight from the 17 THE MINISTRY OP HEALTH. beginning. Eyes, ears, nose, mouth, — all her lofty and all her lowly features, each fibre of her selfsustaining and universal frame, abhors, repudiates and outspews their druggeries and violations, and names them swindlers when they claim her friendship. Yet, perhaps, by her they mean somebody else ! I fell on this saving thought in reading in a book by Mr. Trench, on the significance of words. He finds that words gradually changp their meaning according to the moral state of the users. Now, thought I, (j^vo-is is the Greek for nature ; hence our word, physics, meaning the sciences versed about our world ; hence comes physic, the science of medicine ; a part of knowledge, a kingly part, put by metaphor for the whole : the science of man's physical restoration to the harmonies of things and the music of the spheres. And then in our day, hence comes physic, or three calomel pills and a black draught : which last physic, or drastic purges, are no doubt the phusis — the nature, which the doctors do know. Where they have met her is no longer a mystery, but patent, — " portable and patent." Well, their honesty is saved at the expense of their dignity. We now see through it all as from a tower : Morrison's pills are their universe, the globe to which they gravitate, and physicking is their goddess. But then how does this square with doing nothing ? Inconsistency, let me remark, is a part of many inexact people, and sometimes saves a character : let it now save that of medical science. For nobody can mean that in doing vulgar nothing they are near nature, who, furnished forth by her 18 THE EXPECTANT SCHOOL EXPECTING. Maker, does nearly everything that is done. Were the perfection of medicine to lie in doing nothing, it would be out of the sisterhood of the arts, whose ausy fingers strive to emulate the light in its passage and the heat in its infinite throb, and worthily to sit, earning the moments, on the top-stools of industry in the shining factory of the sun and the planets. The doctors cannot therefore intend to say, that the aim of physic is to do nothing. There is though a class who go rather near this conclusion, and as it were shave nothing very closely. There is the exjectant school : the people who Avait to see what will ;urn up in disease; who note agonies and sketch ;hem, and see when they get better, and when they *row worse : fine students of the natural laws, ascertaining for philosophical transactions the natural duration of fever, whooping-cough, and pneumonia ; ust as expectant agriculturists, sometimes called savages, watch bogs and morasses to see how long they will last in the course of things, and when leaven will drain them, and sow them for waving sheets of corn. These doctors belong to a tract of )hysic recently mapped down : they are in a state of nature, and may be called the aborigines of disease. '. believe they will easily move off farther west, as they have no hold on the soil : like the Chocktaws and the Chippeways they will sell the land which they do not value for a few gewgaws. Their women, sisters of charity, as all women naturally are, will be left behind them, and will constitute a good school of nurses, developing the grand art of nursing on account of the very defect, or annulment, of the medical or higher art. So that our expectants or 19 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. savages will not pass out of the world without a remnant being saved, or good accruing. The Ruler of things brings this out of their laziness. The assiduity of the nurses compensates for the flight of the physicians. This is a second example of the desertion of medicine which we before chronicled, when we noticed that public health had come entirely to be a question of draining, and other non-medical preventive means. You all of you remember the story of the lawyer who conducted the case of a man who had borrowed some useful article from a neighbor, kept it an unconscionable time, and then returned it broken. There were three defences made. First, it was pleaded that the article had never been borrowed : second, that it was whole when sent back; and third, that it was cracked at the time it was lent. The charges against Homoeopathy are much of this cross tissue. First, the Allopaths demonstrate that nothing at all is done ; next, that the effects demand the special interposition of Nature ; and now, third, we have to register, that the great agent in producing them is imagination and fancy, which are usually regarded as powers the most alien from nature's steady ways. I don't hold with the imagination and fancy theory altogether, because sucking babies just born, and also horses, exhibit the rapidly curative effects of Homoeopathy not less than Christians of maturity. And babies and horses, though undoubtedly they have imagination, and are fanciful enough, yet do not imagine in the direction of cure : which is what the Allopathists want for their hypothesis. That the case is so with infants, I aver on my own 20 allopathy's complaints. experience, and that of hundreds of my brethren. But perhaps they imbibe the imagining potency through the mother's credulous milk ; and as perhaps they do, and heartily do I wish that all mothers were credent of Homoeopathy, I will give the sucklings up, and assert the same fact of babes a fair time after weaning, and before they have come to imagine medicinal effects. Neither here, nor with horses (for, Sir, and my Countrymen, we have Homoeopathic veterinarians also, in large practices), do I think that Allopathic subtlety can underdig me. Well, but there is something important which I cheerily admit in this imaginative resort. And I deem that it is a feather in the Homoeopathic cap, that its opponents charge us with having possession of the imagination of our public : just as it is the sure sign of the extreme downfal of our adversaries, that the imagination of the sick, which is commonly known as confidence, has entirely deserted them. A doctor who has no power over the minds of his patients, is very near the street-door of every house of them. Cures, Sir, and my Countrymen, are the things that stir the public imagination, and cause sufferers of all kinds to cast their slimy coils of despair, and to feel new hope and new life already in approaching the threshold of the man of health. Cures by Homoeopathy have created the imagination of which the Allopathists complain ; and continuous cures, year by year, sustain and enlarge it. "Pis a thoroughly solid faculty, and is no other than the vivacious eye of experience directing those whose vision is but dim as yet from the films of disease, to point their suffering faces upwards to the azure lands of hope. This 21 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. imagination, by the wonderful connexion of the mind with the body, is not only the prophet, but in part the realization, of a new-born health. There is not a single successful calling on earth that lives an hour without its own department of this great imagination ; and when the doctors accuse the Homoeopaths of having it, they only shew that they themselves are out of the circle of live arts and sciences, and active citizens, altogether. I will also go further in admission, because I love to give way to our foes ; and now I grant that the mpalpable doses lend themselves to imagination better than grosser quantities. I can't help it, — 'tis an undoubted law of nature. If you can see too much, he mind has less suggestion-room. I note a few perfectly sweet globules labelled aconite, and having md previous good reason to know them benign, my fancy has full range over the potent spirit that may or must be enshrined in their little cenfectionary universes. On the other hand, I stumble across a bottle of salts and senna ; the filthy smell, the nauseous taste, the nasty look are so strong and invasive, that I have no mind to think about them ; they do lot converse with my brains, but with my insulted eyes, nose and mouth : I know they can do me no good; and my imagination will guard my gullet against their mischiefs. Thus it is that Allopathy is an extinguisher to all healing fancies. I admire its impudence in parading its own want of charms as a reason why the public should continue in love with t : as though one's chare-goody should reproach one's Dulcinea with her magic, her beauty, and her sweetness. Well but there is another quite different accusation 22 TUE HOKIIORS OF DECILLIOXTHS. against us, that instead of doing nothing, or handling only fancy, or being the sport of nature, we make use of the strongest poisons known, and are most langerous druggists. lam afraid this is not honest. ?ov the most part we use the same substances as our Allopaths, though on a different principle, and in different doses. Arsenic, mercury, prussic acid, nux vornica, are common to both schools; but we give them in doses ranging from the ten-thousandth to the decillionth of a grain, where the old school administers them in considerable quantities. I challenge them to bring forward one substance in nature which will )roduce any poisonous effects given by the mouth in ;en-thousandths of a grain; which are about our argest doses. The case is the same with regard to our animal poisons, which are utterly harmless as we give them, and most valuable healers. Cobra poison and magnesia are equally innoxious in our way of appliance : the lion lies down with the lamb in the lew city of health. This accusation, however, I opine, is meant for patients, not for medical ears : hey know it is a gross untruth. Indeed, I have had experience of as much. In one notable case that was about to be transferred to my care, a great mad doctor, who possessed the patient and would retain her, told the husband that Homoeopathy was all flam, while he told the poor susceptible wife, that if ever she placed herself under it, the drugs would destroy ler brain entirely. I would not judge him harshly : )ut thought he was on the road to the same place with the lawyer who had the three clever counts to excuse his client for the broken utensil. Before quitting this interesting thesis, the imagi- 23 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. nation, I will discurse so far as to aver that the whole class of fanciful patients are just those who are the most difficult to act upon with Homoeopathic medicines. There is indeed a broad distinction between the imaginative and fanciful classes. The former are no doubt liable to permanent impressions which mayrun on into fixed ideas that set medicinal action at nought, because they set up powerful actions of their own, not dissimilar in their ultimate form to the vibrations produced in the frame by dynamic medicines. But with the fanciful, who by those ignorant of Homoeopathy are often said to be subjects just adapted to its influence, there is such a constant interference on the part of the restless and quick mind with the organization, that not only are the effects of medicines cancelled, but it is difficult to command the capricious patient long enough to work with steadiness towards cure. They are one of our greatest difficulties. Not so however when any acute and serious disease assails them; then, by the law of nature, which does not readily tolerate two great centres of activity in the body at once, the power of fancy is drained of its vigour, and the real malady comes on the scene in its physical predominance. In this case such patients are as readily treated and cured as other persons. I experience this every day, and note in it a convincing proof that in Homoeopathy we have a physical force which is especially adequate to real diseases. You have only to find out truly what is the matter, and to treat the mischief skilfully, and the bodily superaddition to the patient's ordinary maladies gives way. Morbid fancy however comes again on the scene afterwards. 24 ALLOPATHY ENVIES FANCY. Bear in mind then that in fact those in whom imagination and fancy as related to bodily states are predominant, are so far less adapted to Homoeopathic treatment than other people ; precisely because they drug themselves with their own ideas and fancies. And note how little the old school attends to Psychology and mental treatment, when they put forth that morbid mind affords facilities to any method of cure. But then they say sometimes that our successes are the work of diet alone. For my part I can only say that I am very little strict in this matter of diet, excepting that I insist upon certain regulations of common sense, in which men of all schools would agree w r ith me. In chronic cases, coffee and spices and green tea are nearly all I interdict : otherwise I believe chiefly in variety, and allow temperance the run of the kitchen and the cellar. In acute cases, fevers and inflammations, the patient's instincts generally diet him sufficiently; he longs for water and diluents; and these are allowed by everybody. In diet then there is very little difference between us and the old practitioners ; and the corollary is that our superior success is due solely to the superiority of the Homoeopathic medicines. But, Sir and my Countrymen, I see it strikes you that all these hypotheses framed by our adversaries, and knocked down by the most casual bowls of facts, are a cumulative evidence that in our practice there is something extraordinary to be accounted for ; that we do cure most provokingly. You are quite right; and I have no doubt that in place of the dozen exploded reasons brought forward, you now cheerfully c 25 accept our artless explanation ; that we have indeed a principle of a new kind to work from, an art that carries it out, a current faith and courage such as nothing else creates ; and a success and an applause from an ever-Avidening public, that edifies and excites us to continual exertion of thought and study in the delightful path of the healing profession. Instead then of admitting that we manipulate our patients by illegitimate handles of imagination and fancy, I beg to assure you that we simply make fair use of the confidence acquired to us by previous acts of cure, and by this means steady and support the sick through the long days and nights of their diseases. And let me also add, that answering to their confidence, we have ourselves a lively faith procured by experience of success, a faith which exerts a healing strength in the chamber of weakness and pain. Homoeopathy has done a marvel in giving this faith to its medical sons ; had it no other claim than that of reviving the expiring belief of the medical profession in active means, it would already have vast merits. We all know how current the notion has become, that the doctors are sceptics in their own art, and the best praise which they seem to seek now with the light and criticism of Homoeopathy burning and shining around them, is that they give very little medicine. The most advanced among them do not doubt the brute power, but the good of their drugs. This is indeed no positive approach to Homoeopathy, which is a definite principle and a manifold art, excepting in the sense that the ground and table of a razed city is a chance for a new city to be built there ; but it is perhaps a needful stage of disbelief for de- 26 ALLOPATHY TROUBLES CONSCIENCE. stroying that which is meant to pass away. But in the meantime what a blessing is Homoeopathy to those who receive it, and find in it a medical faith and hope which justifies them in their presence beside the suffering and the sick. I can only say, Sir, and my Countrymen, that before I knew Homoeopathy I was in daily moral perplexity at the bedside ; experience had taught me that in many cases I was of more than doubtful benefit : my honesty, without being struck down, Avas troubled in very conscience at the means I employed, and which (though justified by secundum artem, and statistics of secundum necemj, yet were both barbarous and questionable, added fresh stings to disease, took away nature's chance, accelerated decay, and perturbed the last hours of this mortal life. There was in them such a horrid war with the sad dignity proper to death-beds, with the repose of sick men, with the sweet pity of relatives and the commiseration of attendants, with all soft dealing, with every principle of cleanliness and sweetness, that I could not but feel like a disturber and a violent man in recommending and superintending them on many a well-remembered occasion. Oftentimes I would gladly not have been called in under such circumstances j for though I was not fully conscious of the fact, I now know, alive as I am and renewed by faith in Homoeopathy, that I did not believe in the medical art. What a load, what a moral load is removed from me now ; what a delight there is in medical practice ; what countcrchecrs from my own heart answering the cheer of uninjured convalescents. And where I. cannot cure, and cannot retard decease, I have done no mischief, and intro- c 3 27 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. luced no unseemliness, and for the rest I feel that I nm embarked in an ever advancing art and science, and that future years, and my more loving and living Homoeopathic successors, will yet win vast waste ands from the domain of the now incurable, and )lant the fences of health and vigor in a realm of constitutions which lie as yet beyond my feeble )owers. Each man, Sir, and my Countrymen, as he writes ris little book, or says his little say, takes the color of his times, and gains that metaphorical element that lies on every word, from the hues of the public ife with which he is surrounded. Let them then say now, that it is the above living faith in medicine, come down to us renewed by Homoeopathy, that makes its small resolved band not only courageous at the oedside, but full of joy in the presence of the vast extended lines of the . medical foe : servants of a ;ruth that makes us free, the handful of us is more than a match for the myriad serfs of routine and dogma, led on by the old Nicholas, Prejudice. Quantity in drugs fails to cure sickness, and quantity in doctors will be no more successful, though in solidlooking squares of infantry of Apothecaries and light cavalry of physicians, in rescuing the old medical profession. The bayonet point, which is the exigency of the public service and the sharpness of facts, shall disperse the serf-masses, and leave us victors on the field. I must still further notice to you another dodge of those who dream against Homoeopathy ; the common saw, that it is all very wall in chronic diseases, but inapplicable to emergencies and acute cases. The 28 HOMCEOPATHY TACKLES ACUTE DISEASES. irst sure thing is, that it is applicable to acute cases, and cures them with marvellous rapidity : to this I can make affidavit from daily deeds : there is a positive pleasure in the velocity and certainty of such cures under simple circumstances of inflammation, and of course where the disease does not fall upon ;he soil of a bad or broken down constitution. Where ;he latter is the case, Homoeopathy too will do more ;han anything else. My assertion is borne out by lundreds of practitioners in all parts of these islands, of the British possessions, and of the civilized world ; rom the Himalayas to New Orleans, cholera and yellow fever, and other kindred fiends, cower, crouch, and run away before the Homoeopathic rifles : the ex>erience of these practitioners is duly registered, and may be easily read ; they use no other drugs but the Homoeopathic means, with of course an abundant realm of hygienic resources also, fine dieting, skilful cold water, cheery words, real hopeful faces not stereoyped smiles, mesmerism and the rest : and these jractitioners have an abundant clientry, who are not used to run away from them to the violent inefficacious people, whenever disease is sharp and sudden. Moreover, these Homoeopaths are the only evidence proffered in the case ; for their opponents have made no experiments of their means, have no skill in making such, and are consequently out of court. All the testimony then is on one side, in favor of Homoeopathy ; and on the other there is nothing but an irrational growl of impossible, and improbable ; — words from sentiments that would have choked steam, electric telegraphs, and all our recent gifts of God, if they could have forbidden experiment. Our direct 29 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. evidence then is a sufficient reply to the unbased thought, that Homoeopathy cannot tackle acute diseases. I see, however, in the thought an entire scepticism of the powers of medicine on the part of the Allopaths. If drugs have any power over a disease lasting for months and years, and whose roots therefore are of terrible twistiness and oaken toughness, is it likely they should be impotent over mushroom inflammations, mere ebullitions of the blood, caused by cold, anger, grief, and other momentary occasions? The Allopaths must rather mean, that in a disease of years standing, nothing in the guise of medicine has a better chance of being mistaken for something, than in a disease which kills, or ceases, in a few hours. They imply therefore that chronic patients are greater gulls than acute. In the long run I doubt even this. But at any rate it is evident after the fact of the great efficiency of Homoeopathy in rapid inflammations, that all probability is on the same side : that a system capable of treating chronic cases successfully, is a fortiori strong in combating acute diseases. Weeds a night old are, I repeat it, more easy to rid from the earth than primeval forests ; and such is precisely the analogy between acute and chronic diseases. I grant, however, that you must know how to do these small jobs of health gardening, or the weeds will choke your field betimes. But then happily the Homoeopaths do know how. Here let me say a word about the only way of investigating Homoeopathy. If you merely wish to know what the facts of the case are, you must receive them from those who have elicited them, and whose 30 ONLY ONE WAY OF TRYING HOMCEOPATHY. testimony, world-wide, is mmpposed. You cannot gainsay them : you might as well deny the statistics of the Board of Health, or the tables of meteorological observations. This is however but a passive recepion, though affirmative of necessity, such as you give ;o Botany, or Mathematics, or Diamagnetism, or any other science which you do not intend to work out yourself. But if you would be a Homoeopath you must proceed a step further, see practice by others, ;hen practise for yourself, and actually treat diseases. There is no trying, or proving, no active knowledge of Homoeopathy, but only this. Your opinion as to what Homoeopathy is, always measures itself by your answer to the question — How many cases have you 'airly treated, or seen treated ? Every successful aim with a drug lightens it up from the great sun of facts, and engraves its angel property of relief on your soul "or ever : that piece of knowledge is so active to you hat scepticism will never come near it. One such good deed with one of these natural substances God las given us, is like a virtue to a place ; its transacion makes hallowed ground, and creates human or listoric memory. I know no way of learning homoeopathy at all short of this. When each article of Materia Medica has got its knightly spurs for us n this way, then for the first time it defends itself in our minds. So our point is that skilful practice is he king of belief, and that he who has not attained ;o that has not investigated Homoeopathy. In all his, Homoeopathy is precisely on a par with every other business. Of course we have here left entirely n one side those who will not submit to this ordeal : hey are in very fact those who have some other call- 31 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. ing without knowing it, and do not wish to enter on this profession, yet have an unfortunate hanker against it which spoils them for their own vocation. But failing utterly to shew that Homoeopathy is either impossible, improbable, ' inadequate, slow or unready, they turn round upon its practitioners, and assert that they are men who could not get on in the old practice, and that therefore they have taken refuge in Homoeopathy as one of the last forms of quackery. lam fond of making a proper admission on this head. It is indeed true and afterwards likely that the men who can study and apply the exquisite system of specific treatment called Homoeopathy, must have felt ill at ease in handling the gross, low and destructive means of the old calling. To accuse them on this score, is to impugn all those who have the heart to rise from the ranks ; and who feel that the lower walk is too low and too unclean for them. Is it remarkable that a born general, who has the word of command instinct within him, but who from adventitious circumstances is as yet a private, should feel choky when he is blacking the boots, or grooming the horse of some pert ensign. Depend upon it that the pressure and goad of his innate vocation will make him an indifferent shoe-black, and a clumsy stableman. And so most surely a fitness for homoeopathic practice will cause the possessor to fall short, both in skill and success, of the jog-trot Allopathist, so long as he is obliged, by any circumstances, to continue in a field to which he does not belong. It is reported in the same way that John Bunyan was an exceedingly bad cobbler : and the world blesses the fact. The progress of every pilgrim from the 32 HAHNEMANN CREATES MATEItIA MEDICA. lower to the higher station is likely to be accompanied with some excellent incompetency of the kind. They say too that the Homoeopaths have added nothing to medical science : by which science they mean their own jog-trot. Posterity however will not be slow to acknowledge that Hahnemann has created therapeutical medicine, by furnishing it with a central law round which the healing facts and instances of ages, revolve ; which has a new breadth of inductive basis like the other new progressive sciences ; and a co-extensive wealth of deductions, which go direct into practical usefulness. Until Hahnemann was sent by providence, there was not one drug that was known by more than accident; each had come up from the common people and the sim piers, to whom it was known by either tradition, original hap, dogs curing themselves by it in the grass, accidental poisoning, or some other fortuity : it was applied to just the original cases by the faculty, or at best by guess to a limited circle of allied symptoms : and this was Materia Medica. After Hahnemann the leading drugs are already known in their effects upon every region of the organism, head, chest, abdomen, arms and legs ; mind and sensations : each medicinal substance discloses a rich mine of symptoms : and what is significant, the law of similia similibus curantur is no cold abstraction, but directly applies the drug symptom elicited in the healthy organism, to the cure of some similar symptoms of disease. I know no instance of the conversion of an intellectual so directly into a humanitary law : nothing more unitedly creditable to the heart and head of a great discoverer, than this principle announced by the lips c 3 33 ppwr TirT'VTKT'R V fiV TfFA T.TII of Hahnemann. And in all the range of the exact sciences, there need be nothing more exact, than the tallying of drug symptoms with symptoms of diseases, in the hands of a skilful practitioner. It is positively i concrete and practical as well as an exact science — this science of the correspondence of therapeutics with practical healing. Perhaps however without an example you are lardly aware of what I mean by this principle and this correspondence. Let me then illustrate. Ipecacuanha is a drug familiarly known to cause vomiting ; and in Hahnemann' s proving a number of other affections. Now then here, in this substance, we have a )rime remedy for vomiting when it occurs as any iart of the train of symptoms which belong to Ipecacuanha. Yet another instance. Tobacco (tabacum) )roduces depression and deadly faintness on those unused to it : and there is, to my knowledge, no more ikely remedy for those states, often curing them at once, and preventing their recurrence, than this very tabacum. So also arsenic produces inflammation of the stomach ; and it is a potent remedy for that malady. Each medicine requires to be given in the infinitesimal doses ; for two reasons : 1 . Because otherwise it would directly increase the disease, going specifically as it does to the very atoms of the diseased part. 2. Because in the infinitesimal form it has a wider and more profound curative power than when administered in the gross. The facts prove that it is so, and control probability. We see therefore in thus giving the symptoms produced by drugs, that we are collecting the precise means of extinguishing diseases ; and by the proving 34 WHAT HAHNEMANN HAS DONE. of each new drug we may hope to be able to do acts of cure which were impossible before. In this way may Aye not expect that the whole field of disease which has any real analogy with symptoms produced by medicines, will be brought under control ? Most clearly so. And as all mental and moral affections also produce physical effects on the organism, these effects can be reached by the same means ; and the causes at all events be prevented from producing lasting derangements in the body. Mental diseases belong to a different department, but they too are in a degree prevented from waxing when their natural feet are taken away in the removal of their bodily correspondents. This then is what Hahnemann has done — to evoke and train disciplined legions of drugs to wage the battle against the legions of disease : he found a sullen and scattered tribe of untutored warriors ; he left it a mighty army, and one whose ranks are filling with every year : and greatest praise of all, whilst heightening his powers of cure, he has made them utterly harmless for destruction and offence. What other man since the world began ever set in motion the first beginning of so great a movement. Printing, gunpowder, steam, electricity, the true Astronomy, and all the realms of facts revealed, build up our needful parts, and edify the societies of the world ; but this matter, of slaying the old dragon medicine, and successfully attacking disease with a charmed new medicine and alkahest distilled out of that dragonV blood, is an affair that builds the very bones and flesh of the race, prepares new generations of health with successive births, and is properly the 35 TIIE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. foundation, plasma and recipient of all other benefits of art and science, and of all benefactions of God. But besides that Homoeopathy has created Materia Vledica, you will also find that it has placed symptomatology, or the doctrine of symptoms, upon an entirely new basis, from which important results will bllow. In the old system, medicine has gathered up all her knowledge under a few general heads of classiication. These are no doubt useful and convenient, as the medical man's account of disease. But then ;hey are somewhat abstract and scanty, and are apt to degenerate into mere names. There is however another department, and that is, the patient's account of the disease : a much longer story ; full of odd sensations and experiences, and very little listened to as yet. The doctors in general only hear enough of t to enable them to glean what they consider to be ;he matter according to their classification, but a good )art of the sad wealth of the tale, passes their ears without entering them. They parry it and put it aside as non-essential. Homoeopathy does not do ;his, because it wants precise symptoms to correspond with the precision it has attained in the effects of drugs upon the system ; and these symptoms it takes 'rom the reliable lips of the patient himself. Accordngly it alone embraces the true and particular chronicles of disease. In consequence, a new domain is entered by it, and a new nosology created. In a universal sense, this is something parallel to what the stethoscope has done in the diseases of heart and ungs, in which you no longer keep at a distance from ;he patient's chest, and guess the condition within, )ut you put your ear, and hear the state of the 36 WHAT HAHNEMANN HAS DONE. breathing, and the rhythm of the beating. So in Homoeopathy, you take the patient's words as a kind of tube which reveals to your very ear the universal condition of his morbid sensations. A vast and untrodden region also now awaits future medical discoverers here, in the correspondence of sensations, pains and discomforts with physical morbid states : as for instance, what the state of pieces of the brain is during stabbing headaches, during feelings of an iron band round the forehead, and other parts, and so forth. So you see that Homoeopathy can justly claim to have created not only Materia Medica, but also the living history of disease ; and the latter, by the simple and humane method of setting some store by the patient's own account of his feelings. But what Hahnemann has done will appear more clearly from the sequel, when I direct your attention ;o the functions of a Board of Health, which are now or the first time clear and feasible from his life and actions. At present I will only remark that his hining wake is occupied by active successors, who not content with their daily rounds of health-giving, are also laboring earnestly at the proving and winning of new drugs, that fill their places in the great chart of remedial science. Such are the additions to materia medica of lachesis, cobra, podophyllum, and many others, known nothing of by the orthodox jrofession, and yet most indispensable in some of the worst maladies at the bed of sickness. I mention ;his to shew that in Homoeopathy we have a progressive science and a progressive art. This is not the case with old physic. A progressive science is one which on the foundation of to-day builds the 37 THE MINISTRY OP HEALTH. basement of to-morrow, the structure of the next day, the superstructure of the next ; and so on : that is to say, which preserves the past continually in the present. Old physic is no progressive, but a transitive science, always digging new foundations ; busy in the bowels of the earth on Sunday : deserting that hole, and making a new one on Monday : another on Tuesday : and so on through the everlasting animal weeks. It has therefore no age in it, and, strange as it may appear, Homoeopathy is older than Avhat calls itself orthodoxy, which dates its constant year 1 from the last new discoveries of chemistry. Homoeopathy, on the other hand, holds what it has, and by the constant living agency of its law, adds rapid accretions of valuable and really habitable facts. The discoveries of Hahnemann are the pith and marrow, and the first ring of growth ; others already are formed around these : and so it will be with the mighty oak of therapeutics, in which the vast girth of a thousand years hence will enclose in tender keeping the sapling of the Hahnemannian art. Sir, and my Countrymen, I have troubled you with something very like a squabble, and bandied words with old physic in your official parlor, because, for other reasons, and besides that we have been provoked, I meet the good-for-nothing old fellow there making the most pompous requests of public opinion and of the Government of this country. After having vacated all his public functions, and interfered with the ediles and the street-sweepers, he comes with the loudest double raps at the door of Parliament, to request that his vacant chair may be kept vacant and still called his ; and that all unqualified 38 OLD PHYSIC PESTERS PARLIAMENT. practitioners, and all branches of healing unrecognized by his clubs, may be summarily dealt with. Whoso is not " registered " in his book of life, is to be haled before a magistrate, and dismissed the neighborhood in which his heterodoxy flourishes. Many a good homoeopathic sphere of usefulness might thus be cut short ; and many a private envy, hatred and malice be gratified at the expense of the public. And the reason for dealing summarily with us would be, that we are guilty of "irregular practice/ Now " regular practice " means, if anything, practice according to certain rules previously laid down, but where, oh ! ye sharpest-sighted, are the rules in the old practice of medicine ? I know no rules approximating to anything like certainty, and connected even with the subject, but the figures of the bills of mortality. Be it enacted then that sixty-five persons out of every hundred attacked shall die of cholera; whoso cures seventy out of the hundred is by the aggravating fact of thirty-five citizens saved an irregular practitioner. Be it enacted that two hundred souls do decease out of the Ville de Paris next time that good ship is in the Black Sea : otherwise rule, nay, experience, will be violated ; and some Homceopathist will have to bear the brunt of having outraged the old colleges by rescuing 110 French sailors from a water burial. Is not such irregularity in all departments of medicine the one thing needful, and who can tell how to get it, but by allowing the widest liberty to all kinds of practice. The wildest freaks of invention cannot be more deadly than the orthodox rules. No quack, even if he came at the head of a battalion, each man carrying a revolver, and de- 39 dared that his patent consisted in the discharge of its pills among the crew, could be more alarming than these regulars with their smiles before, and their statistics afterwards. Understand, then, Sir, and my Countrymen, that the danger here does not lie on the side of irregular practice. Nothing can be gained by putting down what you Dlease to call quacks. There are many men and women, who from circumstances cannot obtain a diploma, but who have a medical eye in their heads worth a thousand times the sigillum maximum of the jest college upon earth. A Preissnitz is an example that shines with its own unborrowed light, and shews that nature is the fountain of every profession, and raises sons to enlarge and supersede it when it grows old and stiff. If these men, too, are limited, and all sometimes, it is precisely because they now and then take a leaf out of the book of the old routine, — because they have moments of orthodoxy and pedantry, and sink occasionally into the false estate of rules and ruts : but where their instincts and their lumanity are awake and active, they are safe and lealing. Their murders by pedantry, though lamentable, are as nothing to those which take place on the old plan. What I should propose to Parliament, instead of this attempt to put down " quacks/ 3 is a simple bill making it obligatory upon each medical practitioner, man or woman, to declare their style and titles without reserve. Let any one in the kingdom who jleases be a doctor, but let him or her say where they got the degree. If they have taken it by what they conceive to be natural right, let them be forced 40 to add S.D., or Self Dubbed; or N.M.D.C.K. Lond. : the N signifying Non ; or indeed any other letters intelligibly conveying their particular assumption. And let there be a general registration of all medical practitioners of every class, done with no partiality for any alumnus, or any sex ; so that the public shall know exactly the credentials of those whose brassplates they see, and whom they may choose to call in. By this means credentials will have whatever weight belongs to them, and the light of honesty will shine out upon the stock and origin of each man's or woman's first pretensions. And as there will be no slur in being undubbed or self dubbed, so let no concealment be tolerated, but summary jurisdiction await those who, after reasonable notice, are not duly registered. Let also the taking of an unauthorized title be a case of swindling. The registration itself must be in the hands of the tax-collectors, or some other house to house functionaries, and be altogether exempt from the hands of the old medical profession. And the book of registration must be an annual Government report. The colleges, of course, can publish lists of their own members, and any other matters of private interest to themselves. There is no more reason, Sir, why Government should directly patronize one kind of medical education, and destroy the practice of those medical practitioners who have not received it, than why they should grant privileges to one set of bakers, landlords, or butchers, and declare all others irregular. Happily now a days honesty and competency have so far gained a standing, that they will take care of themselves without the props of Government patron- 41 i age; and the diploma of a good medical colleg certifying to a sound education, will have all the fore that is desirable without being armed with the terror of the magistracy. The fear rather is, that respec tability of itself should overbear all other more nativ gifts ; and this will continue to be the case long afte medicine has entered the splendid path of free trad On the other hand, by opening the gates of medicin you will allow new medical education to arise, and b competing with the old, to exact a greater perfection and a great strictness in all departments. Thereaftc we shall have real medical enterprize ; and this kind of central and life-giving energy is the only thing that ought to be protected by the State. The protection consists in the maintenance of entire liberty. Were the contrary system to be carried out, according to the wish of the old profession, medical science would walk about with a cord round its throat, which becoming gradually tighter and tighter, must eventually strangle it. Only fancy the law against irregular practice put in strict force, and what would happen ? After the Homoeopaths were destroyed by it, the least routine of the old doctors would begin to be eyed savagely by their more orthodox fellows : the last set of allopathic ideas and experiments would give up the ghost under the hangman's noose. Then another batch of more timid novelty-seekers would come on the tumbril to the gallows. And so on, by successive processions to death, of all that had a semblance of progress ; until at length a few old barber surgeons and centenarian physicians would represent the medical profession. Wakley and Co. would be the Last Man— left bloom- 42 ) ing alone : tearful roses of the desert ; for too late they might find out that though extreme degrees o] heterodoxy, such as Homoeopathy, may profitably be crushed, yet that to carry out the principle of demolishing all medical heresies, is to involve the sanguinary Lancet and its subscribers in one common ruin. We appeal to them therefore by their dear love of coin not to enter upon a path at the end of which their own destined workhouse lies. Moreover in this land one of our noblest advances consists in having attained to the very reverse of this kind of slavery of articles, tenets and subscriptions in other most important matters. Time was when Quaker itinerants and Methodist ministers were hunted down by the law, and baited by the rabble instigated by the gentry : but that time has gone for ever. Religious dissent is not only allowed ; but any one can be Reverend who pleases ; provided, I presume, he does not take a false title, and commit an act of swindling. Meantime, the universities have maintained all their standing ; and the claimants for their honors and degrees are not less numerous than heretofore. Is it likely that a Parliament and a people which has for some centuries successfully waged the war of religious toleration, should now rear the banner of medical absolutism ; and allow the doctors, who cannot even pretend to any such approach to unity as Thirty-nine Articles, to eject from their houses, homes and occupations all medical dissenters, simply because they do not bow the knee to that great veiled idol, (which I suspect to be merely a gold- laced coat and a pair of official beadle's 43 breeches with nobody in them,) called Regular Practice? If all other reasons were wanting against such a consummation, there is a reason of decency which would still be valid to every true-born Briton. If we are to have a connexion of medicine with the State like the connexion of Church and State, her most gracious Majesty Queen Victoria, God bless her, must then become Defender of the Pharmacopoeia, as she is now Defender of the Faith. Regina, Defensor Fidel, necnon et Pharmacopeia Londinensis I The very penny pieces would blush in their brazen faces to find her sacred image so associated. The pockets of every one of us, if not made of impudence or asbestos, would be scorched into holes by the burning Britannia on the obverse. This reason alone is demonstration that Parliament will never consent to place her Majesty and the coin of this realm in so base a juxtaposition; which yet they must clearly do, if once they connect the State with the medical colleges. Nay worse, but where is this to end ? Were Parliament, Sir, and my Countrymen, so weak, or indeed so mad, every other calling in the empire would on principle exact a similar connexion. The Queen would become, by consent of her poor checkmated ministers, defender of orthodox cheesemongery, orthodox old clothes, orthodox and regular boots and shoes, and all other departments of traffic. Very shortly after that, both Houses of Convocation would humbly petition to be disconnected from her most gracious Majesty; the Church in a body would join the Dissenters, and the Archbishop of Can- 44 * \ terbury contumaciously preach in Ebenezer Chapel on alternate Sundays with Rev. Lohaire Stratekutt ; and all this ruin would have been effected to please Mr. Brady and his aiders and abettors of the old medical schools. Thus conservatism and medical Puseyism would in the end turn out to be revolution ; a word and a thing which every good citizen abhors. Heaven and Lord Palmerston defend us from so dread a crisis ! How is it, Sir, that other branches of human activity flourish in this energetic country ? Assuredly by no government protection. It is a law of British nature, perhaps of universal Man, that wherever a monopoly of any kind is given, an indifferent article is sure to be the result. Were we angels instead of Angles, the case would be to some extent the same. For one great evoker of excellence and improvement is undoubtedly contrast and comparison of different wares. Under monopoly, whether it be monopoly granted to doctrines, or to cotton, or bread stuffs, there are neither contrast nor comparison, nor consequently emulation, but a single unvarying method of production, and a single result. Society, made up of diverse members — each exciting the other in the great race of which the world is the course, protests by its very constitution against any nation, profession, or calling, taking up a position which is fatal to the improvement and alteration of the individual. All this has become so trite now, and in the most material sphere, that I must apologize for recapitulating it. However, there is this excuse : it is as yet imperfectly seen that the same freedom that supplies us with bread will also supply us with physic. 45 THE MINISTRY OF HEATH! It has been too often thought that institution create the handicrafts and mindcrafts that flourisl under their sway, and, as I think, often in spite o them. The fact appears to be, that in every grea nation there are successive drifts in its mind anc bent, amounting to a national organism ; and which incite a certain portion of its sons and daughters to specific occupations. Thus England has perhaps a larger proportion of maritime drift in its genius than other countries, — more born sailors. Now these drift are the issue of a fire in the very heart's heart, which is always pointing its flame finger towards its objects Cunning are they beyond all laws and thoughts, to find their way to gratification, for they are humai instincts a thousand times more pressing and forcible than any animal instincts. No nation has them burn ing in the deep kilns of its subterrene, more power fully than Britain, and hence the quantity of pro vcrbial wisdom directly aiming to remove impediment to their gratification. " A clear stage and no favor ' is one of these saws ; and this is in reality all that is wanted by an industrious people from its Government To allow each man to get scent of the business which will be his forte, and to exercise it without hindrance is the single point to be attained : and this is best done by Government assuming as its grand end, mdi vidual freedom, and using its force to prevent all external pressure, especially of bodies and corporations upon the mind, thought, invention, and originality of the private man. We may rely upon it, that a any given moment, the quantity of the latent instinc brought to bear, is small compared with that which is smothered by the circumprcssuve of old habits, guilds 46 --v A \ MEDICINE UNCRAMPED. and conventionalities ; which act upon the genius of a nation much as Chinese nurses upon the feet of female infants, and stunt it into ugly Chinese beauty. If, therefore, you want more display of the genius of physic, just take off the iron shoes with which the apothecaries have shod infant medicine, the tight garters with which the surgeons have tourniquctted its legs ; the crushing stays with which the stately physicians have given it a wasp's waist instead of a Hygeia's heart and lungs; the choker of parliamentary privilege which is around its neck, and the great stone hat of monopoly which the Journalists have put upon its head ; and let it have loose robes, and fairly grow. You will then see what goodly proportions the Science of Healing has, and when the cruel creases of its bondage have been outgrown, you will find that Nature had provided it with a beauty and a strength that only wanted a clear stage and no favor to develop themselves. |[t is manifest too, that the quantity of healing in ommunity suffers by all privileges given to one set professors. For medicine is not one only, but a ly and congeries — an organism of arts ; and if you low those whose bent calls them to a single branch, i thereby discourage and probably alienate numels other cultivators whose genius incites them to ler departments. In this way, while a profession ms to be full, it may really be overstocked with j kind of practitioners who are comparatively little nted, and offer no supply of other descriptions for ich there is the greatest exigency. And this takes cc because you will not leave Nature's and Provilce's work to them, but undertake it without the 47 v. THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. means of fulfilling it. Such is exactly the case with medicine at present. Drugs and dosers there are in abundance, and straightway the cry is, that the science and art of healing are overstocked ; whereas in very fact, there are at least a dozen great departments of that art which have next to no professors, and the bodies of men suffer from the law-enacted banishment of eleven-twelfths of their ministers. Of consequence the young men and the rising talent of the country fail of their native occupations, and irregular lives and powers thrown away are too often observed among us. Nay, these compressed and stunted instincts breed all kinds of social diseases, and many a clever dishonesty has undoubtedly to be laid to the door of the monopolies and privileges that have barred men from their rightful callings. This will be rectified, Sir, and my Countrymen, in one matter, whenever Parliament leaves physic entirely alone to its own private resources. Of course whenever a practitioner does a piece of culpable mischief, he will still be as liable to an action at law, for an assault, as he is at present. The only difference will be, that his diploma will form no part of the eloquence of counsel, of the scrutiny of medical prosecutors, or of the prejudices of the jury. The question will be as to the injury inflicted by his incompetency, violence, or neglect. Ido not anticipate that the actions against non-licentiates of colleges will become more numerous than at present ; for probably there will then be fewer practising non-licentiates than now, because medical education will become immeasurably less expensive. But there will, I expect, be for a few years a considerable increase of law 48 THE LAWYERS FIND OUT OLD PHYSIC. proceedings against the regular practitioners. For as other bodies will have come into the field on a perfectly equal footing, — bodies that use no violent means, no corrosive drugs, no health-sapping mercurial — it can hardly fail to happen that these bodies, and the individuals they rear, will educate the public in their own sense of the destructive doings of the old school, in their own horror of drugging and its effects; id a public, so tempered, will, it may easily be fore-3n, resent the frequent cases of physical ruin from ugs and bleedings occurring among its valued ambers. Many new legal questions will thus doubt>s arise : as this for instance : whether a man is not titled to compensation for having lost a week's >rk, or a year's work, from a black draught, or a tndred such, administered to the patient's injury : being proved by parallel Homoeopathic cases, that c whole of this treatment could have been done thout, with benefit to the man's health, and ensur£ his speedy recovery. 2. Whether a case of bleeder, similarly proved to be no part of the art of aling, will not be liable to heavy costs from the ctor who has shed blood under professional pretences. For mark you, there is now an art in the vorld which has disallowed bleeding. What the damage for a child's teeth rotted out of its head by calomel treatment, when Homoeopathy would have cured the sickness without, and left the teeth standng ? What the damages for a little boy ruptured in lature's violent struggle to regurgitate the nauseous mixture which Homoeopathy would have had no call o give him, and which left him worse than it found him, plus a Hernia for the surgeon to take care of? I i) 49 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. might extend the list of actionable and criminal causes to any amount : but these will suffice. And they will inevitably come up, as I said before, from the juxtaposition, on equal terms, of Homoeopathy and its benign means, with the murderous old practice of medicine. Parliament ought to be prepared for these cases, of which no doubt it will have warning in the perplexities of the judges, declaring that all the equity is on the side of the prosecution, but that the Law requires to be brought up to the progress of humane events. The end undoubtedly will be, to strike at the root of the mischief, and to forbid the administration of drugs altogether in Allopathic doses; which will be no interference with liberty, but simply with the vend and application of palpable poisons. This has been done already with arsenic, oxalic acid, and other deadly substances, so far as the public is concerned ; and this, simply because it is known that the public can do without such matters profitably, and can make no good use of them, but may do terrible harm. Whenever such is known with regard to the doctors and their drugs; when moreover it is known that their chance of doing harm is a hundredfold greater than that of a man who buys rats-bane and leaves it carelessly for his household ; the same corollary of action and law must apply to them also : and this will be the case when once the public is instructed in Homoeopathy. Nor is it alone in medical cases, so called, that Parliament will ultimately be called upon to interfere in protecting the liberties of the public, and modify - ng the institutions that have grown up under the despotism of the colleges. It is well known what a 50 HOMCEOPATHY LAYS HAND ON SURGERY. prejudice there is in the poorer classes against our hospitals. This is clue to many causes ; no doubt in a measure to a certain jealousy that poor people have, of receiving gratuitous benefactions ; and to a feeling that when within those walls they are encircled by a power that has their bodies in its keeping, and which may try experiments with them while they themselves have no appeal. I believe for the most part that the poor are as well treated by old physic as the rich, and perhaps they escape sooner out of its clutches. As they stand affected by surgery, however, the case is different ; and assuredly numerous operations are annually performed by adroit surgeons that are not warranted by medical laws. Surgery is the residuum and caput mortuum of physic ; what other skill cannot cure is left for the knife. Hence the amount of surgical operations is determined by the state of the medical art ; where this is high, operations are few : where it is bungling and injurious, operative surgery is multiplied. Now as we know that old physic by no means represents what can be done by therapeutical means, it follows that operations are in the main not justifiable until the patients have had the better chance afforded by Homoeopathic treatment. To be operated on at the dictum of an Allopath, is as if a prisoner were to be condemned by a coroner's jury, and executed forthwith : when we know that there is a still further process sifting the rights of life and justice, and that a grand jury alone can decide on the capital events of a case. All that the Allopathist ought to do, is to commit a patient for operation ; the Homoeopathist alone should sentence him to undergo it. Hence the public necessity, in the interest of the d 2 51 )oor, of superadding, by authority of Parliament, a coequal Homoeopathic staff to each and all of our great hospitals and infirmaries. And this could only )e done fairly by giving up a proportion of beds to the Homoeopaths, who would then enter upon their udicial functions in full medical robes. I have long elt that a board of sanction is necessary to allow or disallow all and singular operations on the human rame ; and to prevent dapper surgeons from cutting off what they can't put on again ; and this is all the more necessary, since chloroform has rendered operations so painless at the time, that tempting bits may )e lopped without the least expostulation from the )atient. Now then is the time for Parliament, led on by Mr. Brady, to interfere. The Homoeopaths nay do the old profession a kind service here ; and I im sure that even Mr. Wakley Mill not be sorry to shift some part of the responsibility of great operations on to their shoulders. Should it unfortunately lappen that the medical officers of any existing hospital are contumacious, and repudiate their new colleagues, Parliament can provide for the case, accept their resignation, and decree that the whole staff may )e occupied by the Homoeopathic corps. I do not limit these remarks to cases ordinarily regarded as medical and constitutional, such as cancer, scrofulous swellings of the knee, tumors, and the ike ; for in fact accidents in their treatment and cure are just as much medical cases as any others. One of the strangest laches of the old profession is its total disregard, nay now total oblivion and ignorance, of what have for hundreds of years been termed vulne'ary remedies, i. c. } medicaments that have a direct 52 SURGEON-HERBS UNKNOWN TO SURGEONS. )ower of healing injuries and wounds. So inscient are the doctors of the existence of such a fact, that I doubt not they will smile at my extreme credulity in alleging it. And yet it is most true that arnica in very weak solution as a lotion, and in infinitesimal doses administered inwardly, has marvellous power in obviating the bad effects of bruises and wounds of all sorts ; nay, also of bodily fatigue : that rhus toxicodendron has a similar power over strains, sprains, injuries of ligaments and tendons : that calendula, the common marigold, does the like Christian office br deep wounds in which much flesh is lost; promoting their filling up, and obviating the extent of scars : and that symphytum, (the common great corarey,) is as uniting for broken bones as the others for other lesions.* The series goes far beyond this ; so 'ar, that in all scientific probability every organ and )art of us has surgeon-herbs corresponding to it, and which repair its mischances. No range of facts in ;he world is better authenticated than the curative )owers that these substances exert upon the effects of accidents : in common with hundreds of my Homceo)athic brethren I see those powers in benignant action every day. Now what are we to think of the fact, hat the London hospitals ignore all these things, and lave nothing to put in their places : nothing but saturnine lotions, calomel, purges, leeching, bloodtaking, and other remedies for inflammation that would never have arisen had aconite and arnica been employed in the Homoeopathic way. Such a fact brings t* Solomon's seal, the common daisy, all the stonecrops, eyebright, imus communis, and hundreds of other herbs are wound-herbs ; nown as such to the rustics, but unknown to the medical profession. 53 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. these hospitals at once to the judgment bar of the public, and opinion cannot do other than demand of Parliament that, apart from all medical superciliousness, the poor of this realm shall have secured to them, in their hour of sickness if not torture, the benefit of all the means that are known for their safe and rapid recovery, and return to their firesides and their toils. It will perhaps be alleged that arnica has already had a trial in one of the London hospitals, and failed. Sir, and my Countrymen, do not believe it. Arnica is a Homoeopathic remedy, and produces sufferings not unlike those caused by mechanical injuries ; and hence, if exhibited in large doses, (as was, I understand, the case in the professed trial alluded to,) it will produce an aggravation of the mischief, which will force the medical attendant to discontinue its use. The fair trial can only take place in the Homoeopathic way, of attenuated dilutions, and infinitesimals ; it must be superintended by a skilful Homoeopathist, and all Allopathic drugs suspended at the time. No such trial has been made, nor can be made in our great hospitals, until either their officers become "converted characters," or a Homoeopathic staff is appointed to them, to oversee and correct at least that part of their practice. I look forward w r ith great interest to the Parliamentary action, led on by Mr. Brady, on this imiortant question. The thing is so manifestly humane, ;hat it would be uncharitable to doubt the speedy intervention of the collective wisdom upon it. The results to the poor will be a new lease of limb and ife in many delightful cases; while moreover as a 54 THE POOR FREED FROM lIOBSON's CHOICE. body they will be converted to the hospitals, think of them kindly when they are well ; toast them with grateful recollections, and the women with streaming eyes, when Christmas flames shine brightly on the assembled families of many cottages. And then the effect on the medical profession will be, to bring out the truth and goodness of Homoeopathy in such a white light of superiority to what they already know and do, that they will experience the happiness of entering a new world which the best among them have of course always been seeking ; a vast realm of healing, which their sons, and sons' sons, will be privileged to explore. I only hope the war will be speedily finished, to give the next session of the legislature no excuse for withholding from us for one unnecessary hour these vast treasure-troves of a new humanity. On a single other ground also, and one of the most considerate kind, I would base my advocacy of the introduction of a Homoeopathic department into the hospitals of Great Britain and Ireland. It would give the poor a choice in medical practice, and it would be seen which they like best, Allopathy or Homoeopathy. To ascertain this would be very important; because in fact ultimately the public are the judges of good and bad doctoring, safe means and unsafe, cure or no cure. So that the testimony of the masses of this country might settle much; might provide convenient statistics for guiding the choice of the other classes; and even might influence the medical officers by showing them the practice most in demand. If Allopathy went to the wall in this way, they could noj; say it was anything but 55 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. fair : people have a right to call in whom they please : there was no demand for the article, and it would not pay to supply it. Patients also could compare notes with each other so well under these circumstances : the man who had used arnica and symphytum for his broken leg on the same day that the other broken leg had been left to nature assisted by leeches, liquor plumbi, and pill and draught, in dancing a hornpipe to his still bed-ridden allopathized brother, would be so very contrastive : and the induction so Baconian and immediate. The men who had fallen from a scaffolding together, and both concussed their brains, and of whom the one had received a tasteless arnica and belladonna (which " could do no good," as the Allopathist said when he went with his drawn lancet at the jugular of the other,) while the second had had all inflammation prevented by drawing all that was red out of his veins till his lips were as white as mushroom stalks, and his toes as cold; — these two men, of whom the arnica victim assisted in the ward in the last offices to the thoroughly and scientifically and orthodoxly and coroner's-inquestly treated other; — these two men, as I said before, would furnish medical politics for the hospital, if they could only occur in one ward. Unhappily now they happen remote from each other ; and the benefit of comparison and contrast are lost. Shall not science be entitled (by Parliament, led on by Mr. Brady) to receive the edifying spark of their collision ? I would give the world myself to be present in the waiting-room for out-patients, after the two classes of patients are duly received together : to see the 56 OLD PHYSIC AND THE LAUGH. passions, emotions, conditions, that could not fail to be called out : to find all the joking gradually shifting sides. The laughter would of course begin against the Homoeopaths, " who can do nothing •" but not slowly English mpther wit would stand upon its right heels. As soon as it became a matter of choice, those who chose bleeding, blistering, mercurializing, purging, nauseating, would become fair game for the opposite patients, and excepting in the case of heavy sickness, when pity alone and silence could prevail, they would have to go, each man with his quart bottle to his self-appointed and dirty doom, through such a fire of jests as once hearing would create a Dickens, and running over fill a Thackeray in its course. The police would have to interfere to keep the editors of Punch from the spot, to which they would come rushing, ( ' each with his golden urn," "drawing light." But I forbear to dwell on this important scene which will assuredly take place one day in our grave infirmaries; though whenever that day dawns, the laughter-cure will shew how various nature is in her possibilities of restoration. Now, Sir, and my Countrymen, a good general takes into account the hindrances and difficulties vhich are likely to interfere with his plans, lays all down beforehand, has expedients for emergencies, reckons losses, leaves a margin for the exaggeration of hope and forecasting, has reserves of courage staioned firm in his heart against disappointments; and n short works with the eye and hand of genius and tactics upon the whole broad field of occasion. I have striven to emulate such a man, and as I foresee difficulties, even if we should have the powerful assist- d 3 57 ance of Parliament led on by Mr. Brady, I would humbly propose another strategy should the allopathic fortress not capitulate at once. The mode has succeeded already with Corn Laws, and Navigation Laws, and might equally avail to put us right on this vital matter of the Physic Laws. I propose then a Parliamentary Committee, to enquire into the effects of drugs and the drugging system, and of bleeding, upon the health of the population of Great Britain and Ireland. This will be a fair part, nay, a capital front and beginning to the sanitary movement. And the Blue Book which issues from the labors of that committee, will serve as an important index for medical reform. The public will be deeply interested in it, which is more than can be said of the Parliamentary action upon medical titles and registration, which, though transacted in the highest court, is nothing more than the echo of professional squabbles. A material part of the enquiry may consist in returns of the imports and vend by the great drug houses, of calomel, opium, iodine, drastic purges, narcotic extracts generally, and all the more virulent drugs ; also of the quantities of the same consumed in the great hospitals respectively. This will give an approximative conception of what the public undergoes in medical treatment, and whether any marked effects upon public health are likely to be the result. It will rest, of course, with the committee to call what witnesses they please ; and they, and the legal gentlemen associated with them to make the proper astuteness up, will devise the means of procuring impartial evidence with a mastership of which I can have no idea. In the meantime it is clear, as they 58 HOMOEOPATHY CALLS WITNESSES. wish to learn the effects of drugging on the sick, and as the allopathic doctors, though sick enough, are proverbial for not taking their own medicines, that it will not be necessary to put any direct questions to the medical profession. At best it may be enough to query one or two renowned physicians, just to ascertain what can be said, but with no view to the facts of the case. It is the patients of the United Kingdom who have to depose how they feel aud are after the drugs. Probably the masters of great factories might be useful witnesses to call among the first : I mean, some of those humane chiefs of industry who make it their jusiness to observe the condition of their workmen ; and who are so well respected, that if they were to ssue a request to the men in their employ, they could easily obtain a reliable statistic, with concrete details, of what had been the upshot of the doctoring in several hundred families. They might learn how nany children had died under assiduous treatment ; whether calomel and blistering had been largely or ong employed in each case; how many leechings or bleedings had preceded dissolution ; and whether the treatment had been satisfactory to the parents, or lot : also whether in their notion physicking was any cause of poverty, by wearing out the mothers, and veakening the right arms of the laboring population. Dhey might also ascertain whether in a hundred cases, any proportion of the patients fell into bad habits of vhich the seeds were sown by the use of drugs; whether, for example, a little opium pill gave, in any determinable ratio, a taste for a little bigger piece of opium afterwards, and laid the foundation for opium- 59 eating or laudanum drinking : and whether the supply of warm substances for a sinking at the stomach ever, and in how many cases, led to intemperance. Also whether the enfeebling caused (that is, if caused) by bleeding and drugging, ever, and in how many cases, conducted to the same result, as an escape from the depression of mind and body. They may also enquire whether the habit of poisoning which has appeared as a horrid nightshade in some of our rural districts, had been sown unwittingly in bad minds by the propagation of the drugging system. Benefit societies and clubs might usefully furnish some facts, particularly as they now include patients of various systems ; and it might be seen whether the allopathized sick, for example, were longer laid up than others ; and whether bled and calomelized persons were soon on the sick list again, or the contrary. Details might also be invited, especially from the benevolent clergy, of outlying districts and hamlets, where doctors are few ; and above all, of any remote oases where there are none at all : details respecting the longevity of the population there : whether the poor people crumble away rapidly in the absence of allopathic cement; or whether there is still a trace of that sturdiness that marks the English yeoman, and even occasional instances in those drear localities of silver-haired grandsires on the old bench under the grandeval oak-tree at even, surrounded by their children's children, all laughing with merry teeth, jocund faces, and spirit eyes. It is impossible to state what would be the answer of the public to the enquiry ; but the putting of the questions would cause a great deal of medical thought, and true sani- 60 tary spirit in the population, and if it did probe )ainful spots, and sometimes renew agonies of vain regret, and bitter feelings, it would still be wholeome for future, and above all, for Parliamentary guidance. And for these reasons Ido not see how such a commission can properly fail to have the )owerful advocacy of Mr. Brady. i Should Mr. Brady be chairman of the committee,. '. would hint into his most private ear, that he may ;ain some credit, and elicit facts, by calling to the able-edge some of the dentists in large practice in he metropolis, or in Dublin. Let him ask them to prepare for him a statement of what they know by experience about the effects of medical treatment upon the teeth, and hence upon the powers of mastication and digestion ; whether the drug system stands n any denned relation to caries ; and whether, upon the whole, they regard Allopathy as particularly favorable as a universal means of cure, to the pearls of the woman's mouth, or the ivory array of the man's. And just for the sake of science, let him summon the actuaries of a few great insurance ofices, to ask them whether any preference exists for aking the policies of Allopathic over Homoeopathic )atients ; or which way the matter runs. It is obvious that the questions are somewhat new, and could lardly be answered offhand; but notice might be riven ; printed lists of queries sent round, and even nserted by public advertisement in the journals ; and n a little time, facts would begin to arrange themelves round each query, and a well-stored body of vitnesses would come down to Westminster to Mr. 61 It Will U6 Detter to manage ilie manti mus quicij.^ , at a green-covered board in the rooms of one of the long corridors of the new houses, with a few pacific gentlemen, and Mr. Brady, speaking all in unexcited voices, and the whole falling straightway into inevitable short-hand, to germinate and grow into the thickest of the folio blue books, which only a few heroic men guiding public opinion will master, rather than that so private a public question should go at once, like the Corn Laws, to monster meetings, and perhaps to the boards of Covent Garden out of the musical season. For many reasons I should deprecate a direct appeal to the feelings of my Countrymen on the bleeding and drugging system. Only suppose a Homoeopathic Cobden and Bright appealing from an unwilling and deaf Parliament to the mass of the nation, and instead of providing ample accommodation for tenant farmers, holding out invitation and room for ruined patients ; and what wild passions might not such dangerous fellows evoke, what pangs might they not parade, what real Stygian shadows might they not cause to shuffle and almost to flit before the bleached audience? We might easily have no-physic riots. It might be a part of their tactics, that after the Homoeopathic Cobden with the trenchancy of English sense had carried the theatre with him so far, some haggard wretch lately trebly bled should speak, and the eloquence of his one pale sentence in faint whine would be terror. Then the fiery Homoeopathic Bright would fulmine, and he also would announce on sitting down, that he bad the satisfaction of introducing another patient : when straightway a throat-less grave-bird with swelled 62 AGITATION NOT GOOD. chaps of dough, begins and ends his swampy croak with " the calomel cure." The easiness of this kind of eloquence would be shocking ; those that were most unaccustomed to public speaking would carry the audience the farthest : blanched and skeleton children would have an effect quite disproportioned to their weight and color. The coming together of ;he patients for such a purpose would be a great inexpediency : flocking to a hospital, and shut in mass n its receiving-rooms, they are all going to secundum artem ; but here they are going to criticism, to complaint, to anger, and inevitable passion. And remember that our new agitators would fly from town ;o town, placarding, exciting, pathogogizing, printing tracts, collecting subscriptions, publishing the Antidrug League, with the Anti - bleeding Supplement : rearing a formidable head in the Legislature itself, and finally causing some Allopathic prime minister to apostatize during the next invasion of cholera, and overthrow terra firma under both parties in the houses. For this reason it will be better for Parliament to manage the case itself, never to let it lapse below the stateliness of a committee, and the cold largeness of i Blue Book, but to collect evidence in a still room of the long corridor, and then proceed to shut up Allojathy by direct and clenching legislation. As was the case with the Anti- Slavery Bill, it will be an important point for consideration whether the abolition of old physic shall be immediate, or gradual. On this subject I should indeed be sorry to prejudge and forestall the wisdom of Parliament. Yet I incline for many reasons to suspect that the advocates of immediacy will have the best of it. A principal 63 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. ground is, that after the committee has concluded its labors. Allopathy, from what has been proved of it, will be so thoroughly suspect, that every death which takes place under it must necessarily become the subject of an inquest. And putting decease by old age out of the question, I have received from an august authority a calculation, that for London alone, in ordinary times, the sifting of the Bills of Mortality in that case will occupy for twelve hours a day, every day in the year except Sundays, Forty Coroners and nearly five hundred coroners' jurymen, besides several hundred chemists and pathologists, and barristers innumerable. Mr. Wakley will be able to inform Parliament how inconvenient this will be, from the experience which he has had in the one or two unsuccessful inquests he held upon those who had died in spite of homoeopathic treatment. It will therefore be better, the immediate abolitionists will say, by direct and merciful action, to prevent this unseemly overhauling of the allopathic Morgue; which yet must take place if any respite of years, or even weeks, be injudiciously granted to the condemned system. Mr. Brady's committee will have sad work enough in wading through these rank fields of grief and pain, but their labors need not all be on sorrows, though even then good hope would sustain them : but let them for more reasons than one interpolate their days of enquiry with investigations of a different order. Out of contrast sight shines. Let them invite evidence from the steady fathers and mothers of families in which Homoeopathy has been practised for years, and let them hear the condition of health in 64 mothers' prospects look up. those homes. Let them ask the parents whether the series of their " children's diseases " has indeed been treated without a grain of the ordinary physic ; whether teething has been accomplished without a case of lanced gums; whether measles, whooping cough and scarlet fever have gone away again without depletions and purgations : whether if the parents are more recent converts to Homoeopathy, they have noticed any bettering in the bodies of their little flocks since its adoption ; whether in any cases chronic eruptions, that had resisted old treatment, and got worse under it, and inveterate inflammations of the eyes, had yielded to homoeopathic doses ; whether infants are less susceptible to these than fanciful adults ; whether the mental condition of their children, and their sleep, which is the lake of which the days' states are the river, have been more sweet and even than when drugs were put into their bodies. I would also privately instruct Mr. Brady to direct some of his cleverest questions to the Manchester side of the matter. How have the medical expenses run ? Is it, or is it not, a fact, that in Allopathy one heavy bill engenders another ; that the year's charges for calomel and bleeding are succeeded by the next year's heavier charges ; and that in this way, after the Napoleonic maxim, war supports war : but that in Homoeopathy, on the other hand, much cost is indeed incurred at first in parrying the effects of the old treatment left upon the system, in attacking the maladies of nature, and in steadily combatting constitutional predispositions ; but after the first indispensable assiduity of attendance is past, the medical expenses of the family become as a general rule 65 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. less and less, until at length many or the whole of its members emerge from convalescence altogether, and pass into the ranks of vigor and wholeness. Whether, in short, on the old system the doctor's bill in unhealthy families does not generally increase time after time; and in the new system, decrease? Whether this, in conjunction with the diminished deaths under Homoeopathy, the monetary gain to the community, of citizens saved and funeral expenses saved, be, or be not, a financial consideration of great importance in the State? Mr. Cobden, who I hereby put upon the committee to intensify the arithmetic of Mr. Brady, will do good service in extracting the marrow of this kind of questions. I also regard the evidence of nurses as of much moment in determining the length of the days of Allopathy. Good nursing is a good part of the battle of Cure. Now nurses may be easily summoned by Mr. Brady, who are accustomed to attend to both kinds of patients — the homoeopathic and the other : and it will be edifying to hear from their unscientific lips what they have experienced of the two systems. Are the allopathic means a serious addition to the inevitable distresses of the sick room ; is its service dirty and disgusting to perform ? Are blisters on children sad things to dress in the absence of the doctor ? Is leeching a hard office, and are leechbites apt to bleed too much, and to overdo the blood-cure ? Is the administration of bolus, pill and potion a thing they would gladly get rid of, or the reverse ; and are the discharges provoked by these drenches more uncleanly than disease would have been without them? Is there a large proportion of cases in which the excess 66 of drugging and violent means generally, revolts the patients and their friends, and causes them to try a different mode of treatment? In childbirth, also, have they any contrasted experience bearing upon the labors of the committee? Are women, after their hour of sorrow, relieved of the consequences of nature's struggle by the homoeopathic arnica, and is the number of cases of puerperal fever small in such patients ? Are they better from the omission of the routine purge on the third day, with which the Allopaths assist nature, who would rather be left alone in that quiet-wanting time? Is the quantity and quaity of the mother's milk better when she is not drugged j and have they any facts to give, in their rough way, of the difference in the state of mother md child under the two systems ? I think Mr. Brady will find the evidence of experienced and respectable nurses of great importance. The fact is, that nurses have a great many things )ut upon them, which either ought to be undone or ;he doctors ought to do them for themselves. Many a medicine given to children is so chokingly horrible that a medical practitioner ought to be present to count the pulse and to watch the countenance during ts administration ; just as is properly the case at a nilitary flogging. In my old days I have seen a nurse resign the trembling spoon or cup to the doctor, and say in the boldness of humane terror, " Sir, give it yourself." My own conversion to homoeopathy was attended with one of these experiences. Our eldest child, a baby then, was attacked in the night with a sudden bronchitis, attended with great wheezng and oppression. My wife and I sat on end in bed 67 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. in sanitary conjugal quorum. I ordered ipecacuanha wine as an emetic, and I went down stairs to the surgery and fetched it. There it stood by the bedside, and the question was, who should give it ? My wife said nothing, and I broke a short silence by observing that the medicine was there. She then said, " Well !" and another silence ensued. I too now said, " Well !" and again we were silent. At length Mrs. W. said, "What are you going to do?" I said, " What are you going to do ?" She said she was not going to give the child that medicine. I felt indignant in all my professional frame, and I told her that the ordering of medicine was the doctor's department, that it was the business of mothers and nurses to give it. She replied that I was not only doctor here, but also father and nurse, and that I must do it, or it would not be done ; and she added also, that she had no faith in that stuff; and furthermore that she was glad now that I had seen at home what burdens were daily laid on parents and nurses when I went away from house to house, leaving such things to be transacted between my visits. I thought of the denunciation in the Gospel against those who lay on grievous burdens, which themselves will not touch with one of their fingers j and I could not but admire her disobedience. But she did not stop here ; but told me that for long (she had hinted this before) she had felt a repugnance to all my practice, and that this very occasion was sent, partly to oblige me to look into that new thing called Homoeopathy. The upshot of the particular case was, that my wife gave a piece of ipecacuanha, such as would pass through the eye of a needle, to the child ; and a good and ho- 68 a lady's contumacy. moeopathic remedy it was ; after which, the oppression of the breathing passed away. The circumstance made an impression on my mind, and I now record it, being sure as day that humble and simple as it is, it will leave a mark upon the minds of mothers. Think then, mothers, fathers and nurses, what a blessing it is to you, to get rid at one blow of all these difficult and painful duties which the old practice enjoins upon you ! I see your own health and happiness mantle and rise as you look at your little ones from the bare contemplation of so good a riddance ? But if the application of the old means be an increase of evils in the private sick room, what is it where the sick are congregated together in hospitals and above all on shipboard. Aggregated masses of disease are known to exert a baneful influence upon each individual of the affected groups, and this must be doubly the case where all means are taken to aggravate the discharges that take place. In acute cases, the whole vigor of the old system is directed to forcing the morbid and morbific matters outwards, while Homoeopathy gains its chief triumphs by the extinction of the disease within the frame. Of course ;herefore, the allopathic method spreads all the loathsomeness of maladies under the very senses. And ;hen, moreover, mark the difficulty of attending to the artificially created wants of nature in confined spaces. Supposing that measles breaks out in a ship which has a large number of children on board, one child must have an emetic for oppression of the chest ; another, a blister for a more advanced case of the same ; a third, leeches for pneumonia, with of 69 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. course calomel every two or three hours : some too must be bled, and each and all must be well purged many times in the treatment of their cases. Is this nothing, repeated thirty or fortyfold in the narrow, stifly berths of a ship, where at best simply misery is triumphant ? "What a different picture, Sir, and my Countrymen ! is the homoeopathic treatment of this same complaint. Put twenty drops of the tincture of aconite, third dilution, quite tasteless of the aconite, into a tumbler of water, and give a teaspoonful of it every three hours to all those cases where there is fever : put twenty drops of tincture of pulsatilla, third dilution, similarly tasteless, into a tumbler of water, and give a teaspoonful at intervals of five or six hours to all those where there is but little fever, and the eruption is well out. Leave all their tender bowels to themselves, only don't feed them too much. If other symptoms arise, as pneumonia, don't bleed, don't purge, but give aconite and bnjonia— similarly tasteless, in alternation or succession : and so forth, according to each case. How clean and easy is all this, and God knows it is most efficacious. It is as well done on shipboard as on land ; and then neither in the medicaments nor in the results is the dirt of physic added to the dirt of disease. If Parliament and Mr. Brady regard the sanitary condition of our emigrant ships as of public moment, I put this also to the labors of the committee, as a matter well deserving their most earnest and Christian inquisition. And if I have the ear of any intending emigrants, I conjure them to go out in no ship without being provided with a homoeopathic chest, and a book of directions for the treatment of simple diseases. And 70 MEASLES DISMISSES OLD PHYSIC. above all, I advise them to make constant enquiries about the chartering of homoeopathic ships, which, as many of the merchant princes of London are in the homoeopathic ranks already, is a measure which, with a little setting on foot, may be easily accomplished. This brings me to the last part of my subject, which concerns more particularly the so-called sanitary movement of the day; and now, Sir Benjamin Hall and my Countrymen, I feel that I am closeted with you in an especial sense. For the present I leave Parliament to itself, and Mr. Brady to himself; and I shall be truly glad if I have not to call them in to stimulate any of you in your independent functions. If you will do what I dictate, by yourselves, you shall have all the credit of it; for I guarantee that I will tell nobody out of your private circle that I have been the instigator. Sint sua praemia laudi. Now first, Sir Benjamin, I beg to assure you, that you are not presiding over a Board of Health at all in a medical sense. You are the director of a mere Board of Cleanliness ; the administrator of an edileship; a noble function ; that to a community, and a town, or group of toAvns, which washing, scrubbing, dusting, and putting refuse away, is to a private louse. The old medical profession has, it is true, loaxed you, after having hoaxed Parliament and Mr. Brady, into the belief that you are a great medical officer : but then on the face of it you have issued no medical directions ; you have none such in the background; and all your brightest measures resolve ;hemselves at once into the enforcing of public cleaniness. You will understand me better as I proceed ; 71 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. mt in the meantime let me say, that I honor you extremely in your office, which I believe to be indisjensable, and the creation of it a master-proof that civilization is advancing. But, Sir Benjamin, while your board is to the ;rand edifice of material England what the mistress and her servitors of house-cleaning are to the private dwelling, a Board of Health will be to the community what the medical man is to the family He can never confine himself, when summoned to specific cases, to exploring the kitchen, or supervising the dusthole, which he expects to form part of the daily work of the occupants ; though if anything peculiarly offensive strikes him, he will of course point it out ;o those whose business it was to have seen to it vithout his criticism. But what he does is, to medicate and diet his cases, certain distinct afflictions of disease; to prescribe the particularities of heat, cold, light, air, which belong to those forms of sickness ; to speak of moral and mental treatment : and in short ;o cure the existing maladies. Now just in the same vay, that compound doctor, the Board of Health, has o take measures for the collective sickness ; although any side suggestions he may have to make to your 3oard of Cleanliness will of course be thankfully received ; even if they somewhat reprove you for not laving mastered your own duties quite. " Dear me, ma'am, there's a dreadful smell of cabbage-water lere \" would be a pretty blow from a medical attendant to an English housewife who had a sick child in )ed in the room : and " Sir Benjamin, the drains of Westminster are foul !" would no doubt grate upon t ou from the Board of Health. This would be pre- 72 WHAT A BOARD OF HEALING IS AND DOES. cisely because it would be your business that was thus recalled to you by a foreign council. The first business of a Board of Health, Sir Benjamin, in 1854, or in any other year you please, lies in issuing specific directions to the people of Great Britain and Ireland, for the treatment by them of the early stages of any diseases that may be prevalent in that or any other year. In every family there is such a thing as domestic practice, a pennyworth of salts for this, of paregoric for that, a little peppermint water for wind, and a little magnesia for stomachaches. In Homoeopathy we have none of this; but a wide range of household healers. Now the Board of Health (recollect there is none now) is the mother of Great Britain and Ireland in her administrations of domestic preventions and remedies. It is obviously the public doctor also, for medicine and maternity are seen to be one, transfigured both on that high mount of charity and use. Thus, Sir Benjamin, it is the business of the Board of Health to seize upon the fact of the universal domestic practice, and to edify and educate that practice to the furthest extent which the science of medicine will allow, so that the first grappling of the public with diseases may be as safe, sure and prompt as may be. Each season has its own complaints, and the labors of such a Board will be incessant, to publish in all convenient channels, first, the mode of prevention and prophylaxis for the epidemy of the week or the month ; and secondly, the best mode of treatment in the first or domestic stages of the disorder. This will be a grand education for the medical men themselves, who will then for the first time become E 73 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. conscious of how far they are quite clear in their views of simple disease, and simple treatment ; upon the principle that you understand well that which you can exactly convey to others. It will also give the public a medical education of the greatest use to the community, sharpening at once the appetite for health, and the axe to be laid to the root of disease. In this way again it will exert a most vital influence on the medical profession. For it is a principle that each calling is driven into elevation, just in proportion as the whole community is imbued with the spirit and knowledge of which the Professors are the delegated guardians. Thus an educated audience exacts and rears from its ranks refined orators, in whom the finish of the eloquence of the assembly is brightly seen. A great agricultural people, if it have chiefs in its own strong department, will force them to be men who have no spitful of brute clods left in their creed, but to whom all the ground is one manufactory of humane cultivation. An advancing industrious race will demand of its stewards and overseers, more and more brainwork, and less and less fatigue, as its busy wheels roll on. And so a Great Britain and Ireland, medically educated in home remedies, will, ex necessitate rei, drive up medicine and its colleges, into broader common sense, into greater attention to curative results, and into a wholesome fear of the public as its court of last appeal, and ultimate iudge. It will then be a real distinction to be a successful medical man, because the palm will have been awarded by those who are instructed in the merits of the case. The good doctors will be laudati a laudatis. This however is an oblique result, although we may 74 SPURS FOR DOCTORS. easily see that the case will be so by what has already happened in your own department, from the labors of your Board of Cleanliness. Even now you have talked so much and so well with a hundred mouthpieces, of the necessities of drainage, sewage, omnipresent water pipes for towns ; the permeation of clear streams of water through them at moderate cost ; the formation of parks; the forbidding of mural dunghills and pigstyes ; and the satisfaction of many low needs without which our highest social aspirations are abortive : even now, I say, Sir Benjamin, you have so indoctrinated us all with these exigencies, that a new realm of consciousness has been created in the people : they take no sober Sunday walk to Hampstead without criticising ditches, mantled ponds and swampy lowands; they pass no gully hole without thinking whether you are as good as your word there, or not ; and in short they are in the temper to appreciate what you have done, and to thank you for it, and to brce you, as you value your position, to do more and more. Of course you rejoice in this, — to be carried forward by your own clear will, and also whether you will or no, at the head of these clean legions of your countrymen. You are in the splendid position of perfect necessity and perfect freedom. You must scrub us harder, and bring us out whiter, every month, or pay the piper. And now can you doubt that when the healing consciousness has been developed by the Board of Health, as the cleaning consciousness has been evoked by you, the medical profession also will be a new and higher head to its new population? At present, you know, the case is not so : the old doctors tell as little as possible to anybody c 2 75 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. else : they are all wrapped up in long Greek cloaks of technicalities, with black Latin dominoes and vizors of prescriptions : it is difficult to judge of them except by kill or cure, which is too late : but let the public light once get at them, let them sometimes at least be dressed like other people, let them tell us for our benefit what they know, and they shall willingly march at the head of a force which has just confidence in its leaders. When once they constitute a Board of Health, and quit disguises, they will come into medical daylight, and the people of Great Britain and Ireland along with them. I know they are timid of this, and their eyes but little accustomed to the public sun : moreover they are sadly, I will not say basely afraid of losing much )ractice if they are only called in to difficult • cases, when well skilled mothers find themselves at fault. [ never coidd participate in this fear, which if the worst were to come to the worst, is a well of hope to every honest man in the kingdom. The empire of lisease anywhere abridged, makes all men richer in ;hat locality. Changes from a great demand for an article, to a small, take place gradually; there is always warning enough for the wise : aud the result s most wholesome, inasmuch as enterprise is created every time a new direction is given to skill, by the cessation of an old demand, and the rising up of a different one. Ido indeed believe that when Homoeopathy comes to be universal, and when the Board of Health teaches the millions how to get all the good out of it that the best knowledge will admit, fewer doctors will be required, and those fewer will be rather physicians with insight than men of routine 76 OLD PHYSIC DREADS SKILFUL MOTHERS. (for the mothers will easily have nearly all the routine); but then in the social expansion which goes along with this, how many new callings will come into being; what ready ways of making money there will be when once honest enterprise grows more freely in the human heart ; and how little will a loss of function be regretted by vigorous men, when they see that function admirably performed by fathers and mothers in every house. There is something pusillanimous in the. wail I often hear from the medical practitioners : " Oh ! dear, there is that shocking Mrs. Dunn who is cutting the ground from under my feet with her abominable little Homoeopathic box." Why, my man, you have no spirit, you are on no ground of your own, or no such person could have interfered with you. Rely upon it there is nothing less wholesome to the morality of a profession, than to have a number of idlers in its ranks, people who could be done without, and do something else for the nation : such a state of things rots a calling : it is like a mob of Indian servants, one for the right boot and one for the left, one for your pipe, one for each leg of your three horses, one for your pocket-handkerchief and one for your punkah : you become an illserved and languid wretch yourself, and may well envy any English gentleman who eats, drinks, works, walks and sleeps in the humblest self-dependence. And now, Sir Benjamin, let me gird myself to the task of giving you a specimen of the functions of the coming Board of Health, which, however, as it does not yet exist, must for this time be represented by myself. The present is the very best moment for exemplifying the case ; because, though medicine lies 77 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. buried in thick night, war and pestilence lend ghastly torches, to display the want of public succour, by lifting up for a fold or two the darkness which shrouds the field of mortality and pain. On the 14th of September, Sir Benjamin, the British army, some 30,000 strong, landed on the coast of the Crimea, and that night, being without their tents, the whole force lay upon the ground exaosed to a drenching rain from sunset to sunrise. The consequence, as The Times states it, was a great increase in the maladies of the soldiers, and a large number of fresh cases of cholera occurred. If a Board of Health had been on that spot, in the general orders issued from head quarters in the early morning, would have been comprised this short direction ;o each man of the force: Take rhus toxicodendron. This is because rhus has a specific effect in preventing the injurious consequences that come from ;horough wettings. I am not now speaking of a lotion, but of a matter as well known to us Homoeo)athists as the existence of the Bank of England. Rhus does exert such a power. And I tell you that t is a shameful want of humanity, and of State Ecolomy, not to adopt so simple a means of ensuring some little immunity to the brave men who go out of ;his land, in order to support its traditional grandeur, and by the very reading of their sweet deeds heighten the moral stature of every man who is left in it. Each soldier in that army ought to have had in his knapsack a small medicine case, taking up a few square inches, and of insignificant cost; and then the order, Take rhus, given by the ambulant Board of Health, would have been executed in a moment. An 78 HOMOEOPATHIC RHUS STOPS 30,000 COLDS. army would have been prescribed for, and cared for, and many a death, and still more illnesses prevented. The same case, of thorough wetting, is stated to have occurred to large masses of troops on the night before the battle of Waterloo. What could the old practice offer in such a case ? Why nothing at all, but to let the men get dry again as they could. The calomel pills and senna draughts with which they visit us at home for colds, were impossible. Here then is instance No. 1, in which Homoeopathy makes it possible for a Board of Health to issue most benign instructions which can be carried out if necessary for millions of patients at once ; and this, because it has specific remedies on which all its members are agreed; these, in so compact a shape that they can be kept at hand whilst a waistcoat pocket is left ; and so efficacious, that they will never fail to save a large per centage of lives ; and so inoffensive, that in no case will they enfeeble those who use them. I say, Sir, now, that Homoeopathy comes to you as a statesman, knocks at the door of all the wisdom and humanity that is in you, and beseeches you whether it is worth a hearing : or whether your proud Board shall continue to omit its name from your reports. By heaven, Sir Benjamin, for the sake of the hearts of those who are brave and firm for me in that far land, and for the hearts of wives and families they have left behind them, this thing, this Homoeopathy, this medical contempt, this God's boon to the nations, with you, or in spite of you, shall have a hearing. yYour medical colleagues will try to laugh me off, tell you they did not know of rhus in such a lexion. Believe them there : they know of no 79 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. single feasible way of issuing one instruction bearing upon the public health. But neither they, nor you, are the less to blame on that account. When once you shut your eyes and heart against anything without examining it, if that thing professes to be charged with a message of healing, you must take the consequences of all that is lost by such unhappy obstinacy ; and if the visitant who comes to you in humble guise or the little bread and salt of your best entertainment, happens to be an angel in rags, you have all ;he guilt of shutting out the angel, though in that moment of your blindness you only saw the rags. ' He," Sir Benjamin, " who has done it unto the east of these little ones, has done it unto Me." The jaw of England is at you here as much as the Gospel of Christ. If a man in a drunken fit kills another, ;he drunkenness is no plea of extenuation. Nor when you and your medical circle committed your irst drunken act, of kicking out the modest person of Homoeopathy, will any plea of ignorance save you. At least you knew very well that you were not actng like reasonable beings : you knew that you were condemning, before hearing, and it is no excuse that you did not know what you were condemning. But . will tell you that the angel against which you lammed your door, had in his open hand, as a preent to you from the God of art and science, the lealth of millions of millions. In that same act, Sir Benjamin, you were also sinning against the main experiences of this age. For you know very well that the possessions that endow our civilization now, and carry us in point of the material arts immeasurably beyond the ancients, 80 BOARD OF HEALTH IGNORES RHUS. have each and all been received at first with the contempt and laughter of those whom they came to serve. All these great facts, one after another, have been stigmatized as impossible. Should not this at length have taught you to put aside "impossibility/ and betake yourself to humble learning and investigation ? Are statesmen to be always like the dogs and cats, who are the same in the year 1 as in the year 50, repeating a continual lesson of public shame, and incapable of instruction by experience ? Or will they learn at length that unlikelihood and impossibility are two of the chief liveries which the new gifts and dispensations of Providence wear to sightless eyes and unbelieving hearts ? But we are now in the Crimea, Sir Benjamin, and if your knees are not chattering with the cold you have caught, as " you did not know of rhus toxicodendron," come on with me a few versts to the south of the place of the first drenching. Lady Errol is there, and if she is not afraid, of course you and I are lions. It is the night of the 20th of September : the plain in front of the River Alma, the rocks, slopes, and heights beyond it, the plateau which stretches away from the highlands, are covered with wounded soldiers of many nations. They are covered too with dead men, but let them rest, for they are gone to a better Board of Health. Again, the work of Great Britain has been done; again her sword hilts in its bloody scabbard, double-knighted in that day's fight. I hear the clear approbation of the commander, the answering shout of the victorious legions, the various noise of our twenty-eight thousand ; and also the groans of the wounded and dying : but I c 3 81 hear nothing which appears to emanate from the medical staff. Busy sailors, rough as bears in guise, but making their corny, tarry hands like lamb's fleeces for the nonce, are doing all that gentle women can do to remove the maimed creatures to their ships : and assiduous surgeons are in the rear, extracting Minie balls, and lopping limbs : but, again, in the name of heaven, who minds us all, what general orders has the medical staff to give to meet so general and foreseen a disaster of wounds. "Oh ! Sir," you say, " can nothing be done ?" Yes, most surely, Sir Benjamin, something might have been done, if you and your circle had not turned your faces away from Homoeopathy. Providence, Sir Benjamin, foreseeing ;he strife of the human race, and that broken heads, and pierced bodies, and shattered limbs would be as 'egular a part of man's history as any other diseases, las sown upon His thousand mountains, a yellow lowered plant called arnica, which is by Him commissioned with properties, to heal the wounds inflicted in battle, and to stay many of the sad effects of violence upon the life of His quarrelsome children. And had there existed one gentle Bishop of Health in the British Government, each man of that noble army would have had this arnica in his knapsack, included in the little case I mentioned before ; or perhaps put still more handily, in some side pocket near his heart, in order that if he were struck down for his country, he might reach out his languid fingers, and find that his country had thought of his wounds before they were inflicted, and done its best to stanch them. The general orders before the battle would have contained these words : Take arnica if 82 ARNICA TENDS WOUNDED THOUSANDS. hurt. After the battle hundreds of men could be served with it in a few minutes, if they were incapable of taking it themselves; and mark this, Sir Benjamin, as a well known fact; those men who had it would take comparatively little harm if left upon the ground, as must inevitably be the case with many after great shocks of armies. The Board of Health must answer at the bar of Britain and of God, for having neglected this easy and powerful means of succoring wounded men.* True, "they did not know of arnica;" but that again was because in their pride they would not know of Homoeopathy. Here then is instance No. 2, in which the old practice can offer no shadow of a measure of public health in a great public emergency ; and in which Homoeopathy comes forward with the very thing which is wanted. I told you you should hear something presently about Hahnemann, and this is a little part of the something. But, perhaps, you will tell me that I have torn you to the Crimea somewhat* rudely ; that you had 10 business there ; but that a certain piece of warm green baize is the place of your dominion ; and that you have nothing to do with omissions and misfortunes which happen 3,000 miles away. Sir Benjamin, * Mr. Headland informs me that when the army was starting for the East, he made an offer through a high personage, to the Government, to furnish, at his own cost, any number, say one thousand, of small bottles of arnica, to be distributed among the common soldiers. Many of the officers of the Fusileers provided themselves with this jrand wound-medicine. Mr. Headland's offer was taken no notice of. [t was burked by the medical authorities. Sometime there will be a udgment on back parlors, and the trumpet psalm of that day will contain the text : " The dark places of the earth are full of cruelty." 83 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. you are the accredited centre of the public health department of these realms; and your influence as such radiates throughout the circle of the British dominions. Have you, or have you not, done your best, to close all your avenues against the very name and thought of Homoeopathy? Are you not willingly associated with a packed board of doctors at which Homoeopathy is entirely unrepresented? If this be so, then you have lent all your weight, which is that of the highest health officer in this country, positively Minister of Public Health, to a plan which has choked out of public life all the fair offices which Homoeopathy would have performed for our wounded soldiers. But if you still plead not guilty, because there is the distance of 3,000 miles between the cause and the effect, between the comfortable head quarters and green baize, and the gashed soldier's bloody turf by the River Alma, what then have you to say of the cholera, which has been quite in Westminster ? Sir Benjamin, you have had 12,000 cholera deaths within the compass of your immediate throne, principally in the heart of London. You had ample notice that that enemy was advancing upon you in broad lines from the European coasts. The time of its arrival, and the strength of its assault, were foretold with something of scientific exactness. What preventive measures did you and your Board take, to meet the enemy ? Belonging as you do to a little medical Russia, you knuckled down to fate like arrant Menchikoffs. You wrote leaders in The Times on pure water, drains, and town-decency, and entrenched yourselves in a most respectable recommendation to the sweetest cleanliness. For the rest, if 84 HOMOEOPATHY PREVENTS CHOLERA. the plucky foe will land, he must, and if he will kill our people, he must. The result is, Sir Benjamin, that there are 12,000 cholera dead on your field, and God only knows how many wounded — how many convalescents who will never be busy men or women again in this world. I suppose you did not know of a substance called cuprum (copper) administered in Homoeopathic doses as a preventive against cholera ; and I suppose you did not know of another substance ;ermed veratrum, also similarly and complementarily preventive. Had you and your medical grand chancellery known enough of your professed business to advert to these two gifts of God, a few thousand slips of paper half as big as one of these pages, would lave saved you reams of printing about meteorology and fungi, and the public would have blest your name for cancelling the pestilence, or better still, ;hey would have thought little about either you or it, and you would then have been more than content with an inner blessing of satisfaction from the Great Physician of us all. But now I must tell you about these preventives, to make you know them. A few globules of Homoeopathic cuprum, Sir Benjamin, and the like of veratrum, given alternately, — the copper one morning on rising, and the veratrum the next, will save a great portion of the population from attacks of cholera, and those who still have the disease, will take it far more mildly ; much as is the case with vaccination as prophylactic against small pox. There is abundant evidence to this effect. Not a man who takes these substances in the Homoeopathic form, is worsened or laid up for a moment by their administration. He feels nothing bodily ; but then he does 85 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. feel an immunity in his mind from the gripe of the disease ; and this alone is a signal safeguard against its invasion. The first effect of the medicine is to kill fear, which is a vast cause of cholera attacks at a time when the disease is prevailing. As this is so, think what you have done in giving the cold shoulder to Homoeopathy ! 12,000 dead in London : 12,000 sailors and soldiers dead in the Black Sea and the Baltic ! Is not this an affair of the State ? The demolition of myriads of civic arms ; a myriad hands rotting away in a few nights from the sailor's cutlass and the soldier's sword ! And then the families of the dead ! And most marvellous of all, nothing proposed or thought of by you and your Board, that had not been tried, and its outer incapacity proved, in many previous invasions of the same disorder ! A.nd yet more marvellous still, the only alleged preventive, never so much as mentioned in your jaunty reports, which are full of fine matters for British associations and abstract philosophers ! matters of the same moment to to-day's panic-stricken and pestilencestricken, as Lord Rosse's researches among the nebulse, or Mr. Layard's explorations of the title deeds in the cellars of Sennacherib. Sir, you are costing the country a pretty penny, in disabled industry, and maimed and crippled expeditions, just because you choose to live in the midst of a dense fog and night of doctors, to whom Homoeopathy is anathema maranatha. But let me here again point out to you, that they had nothing to propose to meet the case ; their science lay in opening the nation's bosom to fate : and furthermore, that this Homoeopathy you have flouted, is the only servant which the State 86 has in face of the calamity, and for political as well as all other reasons must come for adoption to the Government of this country, either in spite of you, or the reverse, just as you please. And what did you and the packed Board do when the cholera came? Why, you became, by selfappointment, Clerk to the Fates, and registered each snip of their scissors. The cut threads of life were chronicled and tabulated, and a splendid directory of dead men, a blue book of the last arrivals in the other world, was your proudest achievement. All this is admirable in itself, when regarded as a little side-play of science, accompanying the performance of your grave duties. You did it, and you ought to have done it ; but you ought not to have left the other thing undone. Here also you murdered Homoeopathy ; you dashed the chalice out of the hand of the healing angel ! If you had had any general medical instructions to communicate, they would surely have come forth at such a time ; but like Charles X., who was sparrow-shooting at St. Cloud when he lost his throne and his Swiss in Paris, you were out fungus-hunting when cholera was decimating your own subjects in London. The perfecting of ;he cloaca maxima and all the little cloacae was still your pet plan in the emergency ; and you thought that if you could kill the smell of dead and dying by chloride of lime, the unmannerly corse would no longer come between the wind and your nobility. You and The Times could go to your pillows well after so great a sacrifice to the human conscience ! 87 I suppose you did not know of camphor* given according to homoeopathic directions in the first moments of cholera. It is not my professed object here to instruct you or my other countrymen in the treatment of this disease : my observations on that head are only incidental, for the purpose of displaying for wholesome and most charitable ends to you and all, *the dereliction of you and the packed Board in a national case of dire distress : also, to exhibit to you in a small specimen what the labors of a Board of Health shall be. Well then next time, Sir Benjamin, this Board of Healing will order thirty drops of saturated spirit of camphor to be put in half a tumbler of spring water, and a teaspoonful to be taken every hour as soon as the diarrhoea commences, and * It is well to be recorded that Napoleon 111., Emperor by the grace of God and the will of the French people, knows of camphor in cholera. He has ordered from Headland's 500 bottles of camphor tincture. As this might have been easily made in France, for camphor and alcohol are articles little adulterated, and easily mixed, it is to be resumed that that sagacious and determined Emperor gave the order o shew goodwill to Homoeopathy. We read in the Pays of Oct. 25, as one proof " of the deep solicitude felt by the Emperor and the Jovernment for the welfare of the Army," that " the Emperor has ent to the General-in-Chief of the Army in the East, a considerable number of small bottles containing a preservative against the cholera" These are, without doubt, Headland's very camphor ; though the Pays apparently dare not mention Homoeopathy to ears polite. The Emperor knows that Marshal St. Arnaud owed that lease of life which enabled him to be at the Battle of the Alma, to the homoeopathic instrumentality of Dr. Charge of Marseilles, into whose hands as a dying man the Marshal went long ago. Homoeopathy set him up for a time ; but his constitution was undermined, and he sank under the campaign in the Crimea. His letters are published, in which he gives his unqualified testimony in favor of Homoeopathy. 88 HOMOEOPATHY CURES CHOLERA. long before the doctor can arrive ; and to be taken every half hour, every ten, every five minutes, according to the intensity of the symptoms. Let absolute recumbency, and abstinence from food, be also general orders. If the disorder increases after two or three hours (two or three according to intensity), mix twenty drops of tincture of veratrum, n. 3, in one half tumbler of water : twenty drops of of arsenicum, n. 3, in another : and give a teaspoonful of each alternately every half hour. Should the patient be deathly cold, give in teaspoonfuls iced water, or water as cold as can be had. Mix also at the same time, in another half tumbler, twenty grains, or as much as will lie on a farthing, of cuprum, trituration, n. 3 : and if cramps and convulsions are a prominent symptom, give a teaspoonful of this whenever the pain seems most intolerable : keeping on also with the other medicines. If death appears to ac setting in after these remedies have been administered for some hours, don't budge an inch in hope, aut give in the same way as the veratrum, carbo vegetabilis, tincture, n. 3; and in two hours, if no better, alternate it with stramonium, tincture, n. 3. By the ;ime this has been done, the homoeopath will have arrived, and in thousands of cases to patients rescued 'rom the grave. Have you recommended or tried any of these healers? No. Have they been tried on a great scale by the homoeopaths, and are they fixed facts now, and no experiments ? With a thousand tongues from all climates, Yes, and again, Yes ! Minister President of the health of Great Britain and Ireland, grand educator of soundness of body to the most im~ 89 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. portant community now on earth, distributor of orders for the general tactics of English, Scotch and Irish in the face of pestilence and epidemics, I suppose you did not know of these things ! Perhaps also you will tell me that such general orders may indeed easily be issued, but that the public will not carry them out. At least, Sir Benjamin, you and the packed Board J^ive not tried. And besides it is your business, or that of a Board of Health, whose name your board of cleanliness usurps, to instruct the people in the ways and means of keeping their bodies whole j* to chastise their apathy by your flagrant appeals ; and by propagating examples of the success of your measures, to win the nation to attend to your mani- * Apropos of the medical education of the community, we shall find that under Homoeopathy it begins with early childhood, and is continued throughout life. The little people of families in which our simples are given, get to know easily and soon what has done them good in their minor ailments, and the remedies thus learnt, and which constantly accumulate, are indelibly stamped upon the memory. By the time when such families settle in life, they have acquired an amount of domestic medicine which is highly useful to them. I know by experience that this is the fact. Moreover in this way persons come to be very exactly acquainted with those homoeopathic medicines that suit their particular constitutions. And when once careful and clever mothers have seen their children's diseases treated, and have learnt the successful medicines, (which I am always happy to tell them,) if those diseases recur, they treat them themselves often with complete success. Frequently I have seen bronchitis in children thus cured, in a manner which I should have been proud to achieve in my much regretted allopathic days. Nor do I apprehend danger from mothers' tampering with disease beyond their skill ; this may be the case sometimes under any system ; but the solicitude of mothers as a general rule sends them quite soon enough to the doctors. Of course it is an obvious truth, that when a medical man is once called in, he should take the reins, and have no interference ; but his power of managing this depends upon lis own moral and medical standing. 90 BOAIID OF HEALTH IGNORES HOMOEOPATHY. festoes. The Board of Health will have the same career to run as a single good physician ; it is not to whine because it has its own way to make ; the patients of course have little confidence at first : then a cure comes : then a sunshine of confidence spreads from it : then many cures, and the confidence becomes larger, and at last national, and the attention to every direction of the Board immediate. ? And if there is to be compulsory vaccination, why not something of the same kind with regard to prophylactics (preventives) , and medicines for actual disease ? The tax-gatherers might easily be made instrumental here ; and the sting of their unpopularity be drawn : the " great plague of London " might be made the means of lessening its great pestilences. Why should they not give slips of paper with directions something like those I have detailed, which by their reiteration might bite into the public mind ? Why not have the directions printed on the very papers that demand and receipt our imposts, that so some of the strength taken out of the hand one way might be recovered to it by anticipation in another ? Horse-leeching the people is not the only function of a Government : you might have partly cancelled that severe portion by the blessed office of giver of health. With the British Army, which is under your charge, for it sits under the shadow of your professed medical influence, you have had a grand opportunity of carrying out whatever I have described. When that noble army embarked, there were a series of caamities known to you and the packed Board, which were as sure to happen to the men as the courses of nature are sure. I must take you to each of these, in 91 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. order that you may see what you did when you gave Homoeopathy the go-by. The first was sea-sickness on a great scale, and for a long duration. What general directions did you issue to meet this general and inevitable mischief? You let the men get well again, unaided, as soon as they could : they were left io the laughter of unsick companions. Had you chosen to know of Homoeopathy, the first use of the small medicine-chest that each man of the force would have had with him, would have been made lere. There would have been, before embarkation, general orders to every man to take nux vomica, three globules dry on the tongue, because this prepares the nerves to resist the tossing of the sea. Next, when all were on board, orders would have been given for ;hose who are not sea-sick to give their less fortunate comrades in their intervals of comparative repose, ;hree globules of ipecacuanha, which is of course lomoeopathic to sickness. By a steady perseverance n this plan for a few hours, a vast number of cases would have ceased, and some of the men would have taken their first lesson in administering medicine to their fellows, and the sick would have received their first confidence from its success. By this means, Sir Benjamin, you would have established a footing, many of our jolly fellows would begin to cease laughng at Homoeopathy, and you would gradually pave ;he way for your practice. The soldiers and sailors would believe in their globules with the same trust which they have in their Minie balls. There would of course be a residue of several obstinate cases for ;he surgeons, which they would treat in the same way, with cocculus, petroleum and tabacum, according 92 HOMOEOPATHY CURES SEA-SICK ARMIES. ;o circumstances and symptoms; ordering the comrades to administer these medicines also. By the ime you arrived in the Dardanelles, the whole ex)editionary force would have got the germ of a soldier's medical education, and the next steps would )e more easy. The number of doctor's cases would lave been greatly diminished for the next long voyage, as a considerable proportion of the force would iow know well enough the whole routine of the reatment of sea-sickness. Would they be worse soldiers on that account, or less efficient servants of ler Majesty the Queen and the British nation? I opine what the answer will be from her Majesty, and rom every man of us. And now, Sir Benjamin, as health minister, had this affair of sea-sickness nothing to do with your department ? And tell me further, has any other thing than Homoeopathy ever pretended to issue general prescriptions for such a case ? If not, does anything compete with it for the appointment of state medicine ? I have indeed heard of the allopaths ordering blisters to the stomach in inveterate cases, after the Pharmacopoeia had been administered ; but how would this read in general orders ? You know how it would read. I challenge the allopaths to make any manifesto for the occasion. They will rightly smile at the bare thought of being the depositories of so benign a power. We are now together in Turkey, and our still undiminished 30,000 have a number of minor ailments partly traceable to the climate, and partly to their new conditions. These are more or less epidemic, because like causes produce like effects when applied 93 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. ;o large masses of men. The Board which is to be, describes for them also in general orders, to the *reat delight of the medical men, who have only the residue of difficult cases to manage. For observe ;hat the army doctors, prejudice against Homoeopathy apart, would be glad to have their practice thus reduced to real doctors' cases, while civilian doctors at home dread such a curtailment. This, you note, s a matter of pay. But Ido not delay at this stage. Let us go on to Varna, where the 30,000 are to be exposed to fever. You are clairvoyant, Sir Benjamin ; [ no sooner mention the spot than you are there, just ike Mrs. Wagstaff, or Mr. Hammond's Emma ; you see the men already struggling in the dim folds and coils of vaporous fevers. What did you do for this general calamity, into which the brave 30,000 walked as surely as if they had waded into a Stygian river which lay direct across their march ? You saw them joing in knee-deep : you knew that many would go overhead. What did the Health Minister do ? They had to go there, be it observed, and British soldiers, and French soldiers, go through death as they ford any other river. You did nothing ; and trammelled with the packed allopathic Board, you could do no;hing. If you had then been a clear King of Health, ligher in vigor by a whole head than the best among us, and if you had had your staff of faithful healers n all the armour of Homoeopathy around you, you would have ordered bryonia alba, three globules^ and rhus (our old friend), three globules, on each alternate three hours, as a commencement to all those who felt certain symptoms of indisposition. Thus you would have lessened the number of doctors' cases 94 HOMCEOPATHY CURES FEVERS AND AGUES. to such an extent that the regular staff of medical men would have been quite competent to treat them ; and we should have saved very many lives, and have heard less about the paucity of medical servants. Alack ! the allopaths, who have no general directions to give, were all about you : the Army and Navy and State Medicine, Homoeopathy, was again rudely pushed away. It has, Sir Benjamin, been most trium)hant against these fevers from the Mississippi to the janges j it has immeasurably beaten all the calomel and all the quinine on their own fields j it has robbed and bearded death in many a swamp and jungle ; t has injured no constitution and retarded no convalescence ; yet it was not respectable enough, not to he taste of the flunkey Times enough, to be allowed to rescue our poor fellows on the morasses of the Suxine. Here then you lost another opportunity, not only of saving life, but of building up what I must call for want of happier English, military domestic medicine, — words which involve rather a sad parody for the homeless soldier. Perhaps you also lost the opportunity of treating and converting the Duke of Cambridge and the Prince Napoleon, whose suffrage would have counted beyond price with the troops when they gave their loud voices for Homoeopathy. But let bygones be bygones ; only remember that we have furthermore already found you equally in complete voidance of your Health Ministry, in the cholera on land and at sea, in another perhaps heavier bout of seasickness, in the drenching of the 14th of September, and on the sanguinary field of the Alma. I wonder how much your Imperial Allopathy has cost the coun- 95 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. try by the 21st of December ! what we have paid old Physic for the shrug of the shoulders with which it motioned Homoeopathy down stairs from the green baize table. The beauty of Helen cost the Trojan war, and the beauty of Allopathy well nigh cost us the loss of the expedition to the Crimea; for you know very well that the blow of cholera nearly took the wind out of our mighty armada. Are you, then, not the Minister but the Czar of Health, that you estimate men as so much carrion in the making? Well, let that pass ; and let us hurry on to Balaklava. Now I find you are excessively tired at the end of that day's march : hill, and rock, and steep descent, swamp and forest, have told upon you ; and you are footsore, and sore all over. So am I. So also are myriads more. Now as you and the said myriads require prompt attention, what are the general orders of the King of Health to his wearied subjects ? What is there that is perfectly harmless, easy to take without any preparation, comprisable in a word at the end of Lord Raglan's orders, and quite valid for the bruises of fatigue ? Allopathy, art thou a dumb dog when thy counsel is needed ? Canst thou not answer one question of thine examination in general usefulness ? Dost thou leave the bruised on the march to get unbruised again as best they may ? And is the Health Minister, thy master, dumb also ? The men have to work hard to-morrow, as if they had not been fagged down to-day ; and if thou canst take away the concussion of the march, thou mayest advance by some hours and days the siege of Sebastopol. But thou art a deaf mute ; and I must do the voice for thee. Let each man of the force take arnica again, 96 ARNICA CURES THE MOIL OF FATIGUE. and let him repeat it four times a day as long as his severe toil lasts, which will be throughout the siege. By this means, his extraordinary exertions will do him less harm : if his feet are almost wounded with marching, inflammation will be stopped at the beginning; and if his hands are blistered by carrying sandbags, gabions, fascines, and helping heavy guns up, the blister will be a common blister, and will go no further. A host of ordinary cases will be cancelled by this simple means : an army, two armies, will have learnt the use of arnica and the ready way of making the least of all the lesions of over fatigue : and whatever cases are over and above, the doctors, released from a vast amount of work that no longer belongs to them, can treat with thus (a complement vulnerary to arnica), and then after that the armies will have learnt the use of rims too, and can release the doctors from another circle of cases. Does this strike you as of any importance, Sir Benjamin, or do you aid and abet The Times in bolting the door against it ? If so, what is your proposition ? I see that the insufficiency of the medical staff to meet the wants of the casualty-patients, is the subject of beautiful leaders in the Leading Journal, which will not lead the contributors to its fund to expend any of their £200 cheques upon arnica and rhus. But here Homoeopathy has the small sharp end of its wedge in, which shall be driven right home into the biscuit heart of The Times. This disproportion between doctors and patients is an incurable fact for it : the old system cannot mend it : Dr. Secundum Artem must himself die before the matter can be set right, for it originates in the impossibility under which F 97 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. Dr. S. A. lies, of issuing any general plan of treatment. Medication by single specifics is the only salvation from it. The plan of the old system under a similar case at home happening to an individual, would consist in prescribing rest for some days : saturnine lotions on legs laid up on chairs for swelled eet ; purges for inflammatory symptoms : but this )lan is inapplicable here. The plan of Homoeopathy s the same at Balaklava as it is in Westminster : take arnica repeatedly, and use it externally if you can ; f not, persevere with it internally. You will be on >arade for the morning gun, and if stiff, you will still )e safe ; and you will go cheerily on and about until he fortress capitulates. The fault then of your Board is, that it can give no general orders, and can make no use whatever of the )rains of the troops to enable them to be its assistants n the medical work ; in consequence of which the oldiers are medically just as little informed of their >art at the end of a campaign or twenty campaigns, as they were when they left the Waterloo Bridge Staion. They say that a man is either a fool or a phyician at forty, but the poor trooper, if he attained he age of Methusaleh, would on your present way of dealing be a medical fool as long as he lives. A trange Russian jealousy this, in the old system : it can't attend the people when struck down with the piked truncheon of the accidents of war ; and it wont each them to help themselves. The dog in the manger, rampant, shall be the arms of the packed Board rom henceforth. But this jealousy has another ramification : it opposes the employment of many instructed assistants 98 OLD PHYSIC CAN'T GIVE GENERAL ORDERS. of both sexes who are not decked with a medical diploma. Considering that the diploma people have done nothing in the way of general orders and manifestoes of health and healing, and that 12,000 deaths in the Black Sea by pestilence are the result, I really cannot see the danger of allowing irregular practitioners to intervene.* The irregularity of a smaller mortality might have come of it : a new turn might have been given to the statistics. There is not surely on this earth a man so brazen (out of the immediate vicinity of Printing House Square) as to affirm or even to surmise that more could have died. I propose then, Sir Benjamin, to open the gates of physic somewhat, and to have non-commissioned officers of healing, and rank and file of healing. Let them consist of volunteers, of whom many thousands will forthcome. Let them all be provided with homoeopathic cases, a little more ample than those which the soldiers possess; and let it be a part of their * Hear what Dr. Elliotsox says in The Zoist about this balance of evils. " When a doctor is called in, his doings may be extremely hazardous and fraught with the possibility of unmitigated evil. He may )leed, and physic, and mercurialize, and insist upon low diet, and give tuporifics when he ought to do none of these things, and may cause he patient to grow ten times worse and, at last, to die. He may give neat, strong soup, wine, brandy, or porter when these are all pernicious. He may give bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter : and moreover may orment the patient, perhaps a little innocent sensitive child, with useless blisters, moxas, issues, setons, fiery liniments, incessant nauseous draughts, and cruelly harass the poor creature who is unfortunately in his power through poverty, or, as is very common among all ranks, through ignorance of his incapacity, — an ignorance which renders innumerable patients infatuated with the grossest blockheads who were ever licensed to practise and do mischief ' irnpune per totam terrain.' Such objections are absolute twaddle." f2 99 agreement that they will faithfully inform themselves on a few general points of treatment which the Ministry of Health will direct : that is to say, the first things to be done for cholera, fever, seasickness, influenza, over fatigue, wounds ; and so forth. This will be easy to them. For I beg you to remark, that in Homoeopathy the practice of healing to this extent is an exceedingly simple matter ; to the last degree unmysterious ; in short, there is hardly an old lady in Christendom of average understanding, who cannot be very serviceable in it. Thousands of families already manage thus much at home ; and with the instructions of the Ministry of Health daily given them in Lord Raglan's shortest sentences, they will do it even better in the Crimea. On the old plan, the practice in such a case cannot indeed be said to 3e difficult, because it is flatly impossible, and even unthought of. But. then the new. Sir Benjamin, is the creature of a different hope and day, and belongs to the realm of a more practical sun ! But then the doctors shiver out, " Only think of the body of quacks and irregulars that will be let loose upon the community when the army, with its impedimenta, comes home again : we shall be pushed from our stools." What then ? If you all die out, not more than 65 per cent., or 12,000 in gross in London, will die of cholera on its next visitation. I see no danger impending, which has not been impending and striking for long ages. But then they shiver out again, " Only think of having as competitors the conceited nurses of the Crimea, — flushed with victory over wounds and pestilences, — popular as women alone, and good and brave women, can be, — the 100 HOM(EOPATHY CAN GIVE GENERAL ORDERS. centres of listening circles, — the admirations and oracles of tea tables ; we shall not have a chance, even had we diplomas from all colleges, against these medical Amazonians." There is some reason in this objection, which points indeed to a new state of things, [n the Battle of the Alma, a certain Russian general officer was captured by troops of the Guards, and he is said to have informed his captors that he could put up with that fate, but could not so well have borne to 3e made prisoner by those petticoats, meaning the Highlanders. He did not know what hearts beat under Scotch plaid, or what steel sinews Highland petticoats cover. And the medical Russians of this country are just as much out with regard to petticoats generally. They have no idea what woman can do with her round arm of healing. Woman, Sir Benjamin, in this country, is the pillar of Homoeopathy : she first saw the horrors of the old system in her own nursery among her loved ones : she first has experienced the blessings of the new. It was she that emancipated the slave : it will be she that ultimately rescues the Briton from the crooked and venomous darts of physic. She will then enter upon one of her own callings from which she has too long been excluded. In all respects one half of medical practice )elongs to Homoeopathic woman. Only note her qualities. The first of these is intuition, the bird's eye of her ever busy love. With this she marks symptoms and bodily states in those she sincerely ends, with such an anticipation of correctness as no mysician can safely disallow. Were this intuition ixed and educated, it would readily pass into stable medical insight. Her fine senses animated by this, 101 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. might soon eclipse the corresponding organism in the man in several fields of diagnosis. Take the diseases of the heart and lungs, and I have no hesitation in affirming that the woman's educated ear might carry the knowledge of these as matters of hearing far beyond the point at which it at present stands. She might be taught all matters of common diagnosis in these complaints with great rapidity ; and I believe a time is at hand when all good mothers will know them. As to practice, Homoeopathy has distinctly opened it to woman. So united are all God's gifts, so much do they converge to one another and to ligher principles common to them all, that this man Hahnemann, without having that end in view, has done more than any one else perhaps towards the emancipation of woman, by providing her with a field of the most humane and artistic usefulness, in which ler beautiful powers, can expand. It is a great thing or anything when new blood comes into it ; and the lewer the blood the less bounded is the hope. What hen may we not augur for medicine when an entire setter half is added to it ; when the Lady Hygeia is really in practice. I should expect at least a set of observations quite novel in their nicety, and of remelial touches delicate beyond compare. The appearance of woman upon the world's stage as a healer beongs to the present hour, and in its breadth was mpossible before Homoeopathy came. She can have no material function with old physic, which shuts tself up in the frowning walls of dead languages and rank male diplomas. Providence has kept her hands white of it until this time ; and in those pure hands she now receives from Him a principle of guidance 102 and a set of remedies that will not soil them. The keen end of this wedge also is in, and it will be driven home. War and pestilence are the Thor's hammers that will send it into the core of physic. Was ever common sense more clear than that women are the proper nurses ' for wounded soldiers ? Why they should have been excluded beats all reasonable conjecture. The ladies of Antwerp and Brussels ministered to thousands of such after the Battle of Waterloo. Women, by their patient virtues and powers of endurance, are quite competent to follow an army in the field ; they always stood as a second array at the back of the old Teutonic hosts ; nay, in disorderly crowds they have followed all armies since wars were made. Why should they not now follow in wellappointed bands of charity ? And for another thing, why should they not be instructed in homoeopathic medicine, receive certificates of competency so far, take more and more work from the overburdened shoulders of the medical man, and emancipate the attention of the doctors for the worst cases and the most dangerous casualties ? Because the doctors are timid of bringing such rivals into the field afterwards ? At any rate, by shutting out the other sex from a participation in their labors, they have taken so much upon themselves that the work is not performed at all, according to the unanimous testimony of all impartial eyewitnesses. It appears then, that of necessity laymen must come in, women must come in ; and to make the best of both these newly enfranchised classes, Homoeopathy must come in, and teach what to do, and how to do it. This is God's wedge of Fate. This reform has many nuclei, — little centres from 103 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. which the newness is growing, nor perhaps will it end until Doctresses are properly seated in all our large communities. A beginning has been made in the United States, and by two high-minded English ladies, who have each passed through an entire curriculum of medical studies, and taken doctors' degrees. I allude to Doctor Elizabeth and Doctor Emily Blackwell, both of whom I have the honor of knowing personally. From Dr 0 Elizabeth Blackwell I received the affecting tale of her struggle. Before I had the pleasure of meeting her, I was accustomed to smile at the notion of female physicians, and I was imbued with the prejudice, that the art of healing was not intended for women. But when I met her, I received the confutation of my hypothesis ; and I saw at once that where one such lady could exist, two could exist, and in short that she was the model and the prophecy of medical ladies. She is now in practice in New York, — not, I grieve to say, a Homoeopathist ; but T am thankful for her as a presence in medicine at all. She told me that she had long determined to open medicine to her sex, and to recognize no difficulties but as they came. She applied to various colleges for permission to attend the courses of lectures, but always with the result of polite refusal. At last a college in Philadelphia opened to her solicitation. The day on which she was to take her place in the class, the Professor told his students that a lady was about to join their ranks, and he hoped well of them for her sake and for their own. There she continued, assiduous in all departments ; she did her part in the dissecting room like the rest, only, I have no doubt, with a grave and reverent perseverance that was diffi- 104 DOCTOR ELIZABETH BLACKWELL. tult to equal ; and at last she Avent up for her examiation, passed it^ and took her degree. When she left college, the Professor again addressed his class ; he acknowledged that his admonitions had been hon- E'ably fulfilled, and that never before had he known ithin those walls so thorough an obedience to decoim. And he added that for this cause, he should ways be glad if he could have such ladies among them. Imagine, Sir Benjamin, what a threatening filmy mob of Times papers and nickering Punches such a woman as that walked through without knowing it, with her quick unswerving resolution. I think you will admit she might have nerve on a medical emergency, and be entitled to prescribe with a cool head what she had learnt with so much labor, and was bent to practise with so powerful a volition. Imd there are many others of the same sort both in Ingland and America, though they have not yet had reathing room to come forth. I know that excel;nt ladies will say, " I should not like to study medicine in that fashion." But then Doctor Elizabeth Blackwell did like it, and did determine it : and it is only those who so like and so determine that will be tvoked in such a character by the new wants of the rorld. People are born for such gigantic works as fiese : Hygeice nascuntur, non fiunt ; and all we have to do is simple free trade over again. Let them try their strength, and have their chance : if female physicians are a mistake against nature, they will come to nought. If they are a true function, do not let us throw one pebble of our unfair and ungallant hindrance in the rough path of their trial. For my part, Sir Benjamin, I do not think they f3 105 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. will come to nought ; and I have adduced this case, jecause it forms a kind of head and front to all I lave been dwelling upon about the imparting of medical knowledge to new classes of the people. The entire realm of practising mothers, of nurses, of sisters of charity of all descriptions, will have its fountain of honor, and well-head of information, from educated accredited women of scientific talent and real professional standing. And therefore, though the matter be still a little in the future, I thought that you, as Health Minister, might as well keep it in your eye, and have a slight inkling about it. The medical colleges here have too long been accustomed to be called old women : it would be a pleasant change for them, if some score of silvery voices from their number could tell the public that they are young ones. But to return for a moment to the practical subject of nurses for our armies, I would remark that the great omission in the conception of the office, as an institution, appears to me possibly to lie in not fairly developing what I will call the female side of armies. It is only contemplated to form the lower tiers of that needful service, and of course a large cortege of women who are exempted from the moral tone of the higher members of their own sex, will be very likely to fall into temptations, just as would be the case if there were no heads, no ladies among them, to guide, advise and preserve them, here at home. The remedy lies in inviting patriotic ladies into the field. I mean it literally. There are plenty of officers' wives, plenty of Lady Errols, now mouldering for want of a function, who would answer this call ; and whose chaste presence and womanly dignity would protect the 106 THE LADIES IX THE FIELD. female legion, and make it available for medical service. The sisters of charity are protected by the sanctity of religion; why should that be absent from our bands of devoted ladies ? The Teutonic institution only wants bringing up to the mark of the age, to be the thing still for the succor of the wounded Anglo-Saxon hosts. False medical dignity must however come down to an immense extent in carrying out this courageously. The ladies must be fairly at the head of their own departments. The gap between the aristocrats and the serfs in our medical Russia, between the diploma doctors and the poor nurses, must be filled up by an independent middle class of healers with an acknowledged charter of their own. This is a plenary revolution, but it must be accomplished. If there were no other reason, Sir Benjamin, for the commissioning of ladies and subordinate females in this crying hour, you would find a strong one in the extreme difficulty you will, I fear, experience, in Drocuring the required number of Homoeopathic surgeons. You and the country will now find to grievous cost what The Lancet, The Times, and The Athenamm lave been doing for years past, in discouraging all cnowledge of Homoeopathy among the medical men, and in browbeating those who were determined to nform themselves about it. They have been only too successful, and now, when you want Homoeopaths to rescue the men from the jaw of those casualties which are summed up in the effects of war and pestilence, you will find that nearly the entire Homoeopathic corps in these Islands is already pre-engaged in the ample services of private practice. In short, they are 107 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. oo few for the people at home. You must therefore advertize far and wide, and take who you may ; any will be better than the Allopathic incapables, who sit jeside the active cholera, fumbling and tabulating, Death's Statisticians. But probably you will be enabled to enlist several Homoeopaths from the Continent of Europe. And you are to recollect, that each of these will be serviceable for a far larger number of patients than a single medical man can help under the old plan. But the ladies will be a city of refuge for you here ; for The Lancet, The Times, and The Athenaeum, have no whit frightened them from studyng the true art of healing in and for their own circles. They go by facts and cures, and not by orthodoxy. And this again is one more necessity by which they press themselves into the public service. Events, however, thicken in this direction before my ink is dry. Doctor Blackwell is already but one of a band of which Florence Nightingale is the English chief, and some of the best woman's blood in this country is speeding to the field of war, to do woman's work as it has not been done before since the days of Jeanne d'Arc. I will not trust myself to think or to feel while the Lord thus calls up his chosen into their long empty places, lest the brain should be drowned in the too great hour. Only I will say, it rejoices me, that medicine, (call it nursing if you please, but it will not stop there,) is the thing which has unchained the feet of woman, and cast away her Chinese shoes. And as in sensual Judsea of old, the light of this burning chastity springs forth in the land of the Hareem. For the rest let me watch with reverent amaze as Providence uncloses these doors, and shews 108 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. me the aisles of hero women within, and the interminable human whiteness of the future. Before I quit the special subject of the army and navy, I will advert to one great service which you must hasten to do for all those who are in the ranks of either. You know that the Briton, in theory, by becoming a soldier does not cease to be a citizen. Now the citizen at home can adopt Homoeopathy if he pleases, without incurring any greater penalty than the sneers and jeers of all the " regular practitioners" in his neighborhood. But the officer, and a fortiori the common soldier, has no such freedom. The regimental surgeons have absolute power over him in this respect. He can get no ticket of sick leave without their active interference ; without their signature : and the first question they ask him is, Whether he has taken their medicine ? If he is a Homoeopathist, believing to ;he core in the venomousness of old physic, he must either lie, and say he has, which British officers will not do, or else he must swallow the potions to qualify rimself for the proper answer. If he declines pill and [raught, he may not get his sick certificate, and is, understand, liable to be tried by court-martial. If le is known to favor Homoeopathy, to have his chest of globules, and thereby to keep himself out of the hands of the army doctors as long as he can, he is a marked man, and knows well what he has to expect whenever necessity obliges him to hold official interview with the regimental surgeon. We on this free shore, who know what the conduct of the medical profession is here to all who are suspected of Homoeopathy, with what thorough disdain they are treated by the men of diplomas, may easily form some slight 109 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. conception of what the case and treatment may be, where military sternness and complete power are added to so much professional truculence, and patients are under the shod heel of medical mercy. The Homoeopathic officer is paid out in the Crimea with a vengeance, for the freedom of opinion which le dared to assert, and to commit to practice at home. Can you imagine anything, Sir Benjamin, more derogatory to the manliness of our gallant army, than to be thus coerced by an old-womanish folly of sys;em, to swallow nausea in the same manner as used to be the wont with poor little boys in the bad old time ? Think of a bit of a doctor standing with his bul cup, and spoon smeared with bolus, over a general, and after threat after threat, exclaiming at him with the look of a court-martial in his eye, " Will you take it now ?" And yet this happens every day n substance. The army has got so far as that protestants do not cram catholics, or vice versd, with unpalatable doctrines; and why should Allopathy >our its stuff down unwilling throats. Let there be iberty in medicine, as in other matters of creed. At east let the number of Homoeopaths in the force be ascertained — His a vital point for future health — and et the proportion between the medical men of the two ystems be regulated thereby. It is so already with he clergy. If you will fairly see this point alone carried out, you will have the thanks of both services, and by placing them on a level with our citizens, you will rescue them from the trammels of a disgusting slavery. tl am sure, Sir Benjamin, after the fever, the chora, the sickness, the drenching, the battle, the arch, and the siege, it has been a relief to you to 110 DOCTOR SMITH'S BEATITUDES. feel the soft hand of the ladies ; but we must now accinge ourselves to other less agreeable considerations. To day I received by chance The Morning Post, and a side of it was occupied with a catalogue headed, and Surgical Stores for the Army, It is from Dr. Smith, the Director General of the Army and Ordnance Medical Department ; and The Post hopes that "his assurances will convince the public that every necessary precaution has been taken to alleviate, so far as circumstances permit, the sufferings of those brave men who may unfortunately fall in discharging their duty to the country." Dr. Smith also "is happy in being able to state confidently that the medical officers at Scutari have at their command everything necessary to the treatment of the wounded soldier ; hence there is no necessity whatever for any effort being made by the public," &c. Then follows the list of stores, something like an index to the London Pharmacopeia, with vast poundage assigned to many poisonous substances. 500 pounds weight of blistering plaster : 134 pounds of calomel; 150 pounds of contrite jalap; 1,570 pounds of castor oil : 30 pounds of contrite opium ; 100 pounds of colocynth pill, and 100 of blue pill : 150 pounds of Dover's powder : 250 pounds of laudanum, and 250 of tincture of rhubarb. This is taken from the first list of stores. There are three lists. In the third supply, sent out on the 15th of September, and which might be landed at Scutari about the 30th, ten days after the battle of the Alma, there is an insertion of 5 pounds 2 ounces of tincture of arnica, and it would appear that on the 24th of October, another similar supply of arnica will be forwarded to 111 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. Scutari. After my previous pages, Sir Benjamin, you will know how to value Dr. Smith's happiness, and the Italic everything upon which it is founded. My ideas of everything and nothing are at this moment passing through each other; for what the Doctor calls everything, I call nothing j and what he mplies as nothing, is for me everything. Arnica and hus are the first everything for the wounded man : arnica has for ages merited and got the title, panacea apsorum : the all-cure of the fallen : 5 pints of arnica, ommanded and inserted in the third list by some oul that loves its bleeding fellows, arrives at Scutari en day after the bloody fair. The list has no veratrum, cuprum, dulcamara, or any of our simples that aye men's lives. In one word, Homoeopathy has lot one line of its own on the huge broadsheet. One battle has been fought, Sir Benjamin, and how many are yet to fight ? Is Dr. Smith's empty everything o be the limit that the Health Minister, that the House of Commons, and that Her Most Gracious Majesty prescribes as "all that is necessary to the reatment of the wounded soldier." Then let the bitter tears of friends and relations at home fall upon hat narrow cruel " everything." The country, like ' Holy Russia," practically leaves its fallen sons in he rear, and hurries on to only brutal glories. On the surgical side of the list there are 109 cupping instruments; 600 lancets; 100 blood porringers ! We might have left this department, of shedding British blood, to the Russians. Now only think, Sir Benjamin, that all these grim groceries might admirably have been left behind, to the infinite benefit of both services, and the great 112 liscouragement of the holy Czar. I will not put Mr. Urquhart on the scent, but it strikes me that if le were to impeach you for being in Russian pay, he might make out a very plausible case. 134 pounds of calomel found on your person, you being in the 3ritish camp, just before a great action ; and with every presumption that you intended it, not for the Muscovites, but for our troops ! 1,000 and odd rounds of castor oil secreted about you in three separate places, and more on its way into your possession : and every reason to suppose that it again was for our men. 100 pounds of blue pill also, and hundreds of pounds of laudanum, in your pernicious wallet ! Talk of poisoning wells, Sir Benjamin ; that is a trifle to what the Health Minister has sanctioned. A drumlead court martial might have made short work of r ou. However, I acquit you ; clinging to the hope that you meant the poison for Menchikoff and Nachimoff. Even while I write this, another medical event las occurred which is significant many ways. The Times newspaper by a hint, has called forth a subscription from the public of ,£10,000; a subscription headed by Sir Robert Peel ; for the effectual succor of the wounded : and the lagging Government has followed in the wake of The Times. This shews the vast tremble of the public heart, and what it could do if only rightly directed. But it is going to bolster up exactly the same system, which has been so inefficacious before : for it begins from the parlor of the journal in which Homoeopathy has been already smothered. No arnica is to be forwarded to Sebastopol, or to Scutari, that I can hear of — no arnica, to assuage the dreadful thirst of the wounded : no 113 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. calendula, to make the flesh grow in the gaping places : no symphytum for the shattered bones ! No homoeopathic medicine chests ! At the bottom of this well-peaked, protrusive, cotton-made bosom of the charity of The Times, there lurk horrid dry ribs of cruelty, a very skeleton in the land. It does good in the market-place, and murders Homoeopathy, the only true servitor of the wounded, in the closet. I lave been also shocked to see a letter signed Robert Grosvenor, who is president of a homoeopathic hospital, and member for Middlesex, who knows what arnica and Homoeopathy are in his own family, yet tias not a word to say in the leading journal of their application to the British troops. Oh ! fie ! thou leader of the people ! Why canst thou not lead them to that good of which thou knowest ? Very likely The Times would not have put his letter in if he had Dreathed a word of arnica and Homoeopathy. But what then ? it did no good when it was in : it had no rememberable part, not even a mite of money : nothing but my Lord's dumbness of the good he knew, endorsed by his noble name. Had he made the right effort, the military journals, whose especial business medical justice to the Army perhaps is, would have given him a sufficient hearing ; and then he would not have had the sad reflexion of having put his candle under a bushel at the time when the British Empire craved his little light. But let me do one pleasant justice : I would to God I could do more : I rejoice to see chloroform included in the list of ample supplies. That greatest surgical discovery of the age, that prompt lethe, has always been to my mind one of the greatest realiza- 114 THE PHARISEE EUTJERS HIS VICTIM. tions of the benevolent "punctuality of Providence." Of course its administration involves skill, and it may be a fair question whether a soldier faint from loss of blood is a fit subject for the appliance of chloroform. On the other hand, I do not admire a hypothesis advanced by a surgeon in The Times, that the prods of the agonies of operations are a good stimulus to the half swooning wounded. There is a sharpness in that practice that hurts humanity, unless the fact be quite correct ; in which case of course it is humane. But I protest against recording the small per myriadage of chloroform deaths as conclusive against the use of anaesthetics. Dr. Simpson, my adversary in all else, is my true man here. Let another table of deaths, a heavier list I opine, be balanced against this, — that, I mean, of those who die of the nervous shock that the knife gives to flesh and blood and bone. The one average should be fairly set against the other ; the difference be taken ; the result be stated to those whom it most concerns, the patients ; and as the chances of casualty are confessedly very small, the patients may have the choice of braving the peril if they please. But it would be most inhuman not to allow them the immunity from pain which they may crave in moments so terrible as those of surgical interference. And now, Sir Benjamin, apropos of chloroform, let us take a peep into those low tents in the rear where the good surgeons with shirt sleeves up are doing their work. The air is hot and fleshy with the red reek which is there, but the spirit of the day, particularly as you have lost no blood yourself, will snp)ort you from fainting. I want you to mark all the 115 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. noble assiduity in that nickering candle-light; the strong skill of the swimmers in that sea g£ horrors. There is a precipitation, too, such as these sanguinary instants demand ; yet I think it is somewhat chargeable to you and the Board that the hurry is greater than it need be. Nature in her direst emergencies, always has more time to give away than fear and want of knowledge deem. It is only Allopathy that has no simples, and no waiting, that is to say, no observation. If you had used your arnica, Sir Benjamin, on the field, there need not have been quite so much haste in the surgical tents : and fewer men would have died in their litters as they were being carried to the fleet. Every operation that can be postponed from the battle-field to the hospital, gives a better chance to the patients, and the arnica which you and your Board would not give, would have made you the time of that postponement. The system of which you are the head sends the whole profession of physic, and especially of surgery, into an unseemly hurry for instant effects, and to capital operations. You have therefore now witnessed under your own eye the extraction of balls which ought to have been left in, and the amputation of limbs which ought to have been left on ; and that has happened because you and the Board have been obdurate against the vulnerary remedies of the homoeopaths. In consequence, many lives have been lost, many surgical blunders committed, much has been done offhand which required great deliberation ; many wounded men just dead from loss of blood, have lost more still by your operations, and have succumbed : and in short, you have been the patron of the spirit 116 THE MORE HASTE THE WORSE SPEED. of hurry, which, though it be the animating breath of old physic, has no part in Homoeopathy ; whose leading motto here also is, tuto, cito, et jucunde. I must also tell you that you have lost here a fine occasion for enlisting on the side of the healing art the surgeons themselves, who have hardly a scrap of faith in old physic, but who will be brought round to the new faith precisely by witnessing, as pupils of the homoeopaths, and often of the homoeopathic laity, the undoubted action of vulnerary remedies. The [ate Mr. Liston once told me that " medicine was a stupid art." He and his brethren are so much accustomed to real effects with their catlines and bistouries, that they lack all feeling of solid fact in the no-results for cure of the allopathic medicines. But arnica, rhus, calendula, and the other wound-herbs do proffer such speaking effects of the power which medicines exert in wounds, bruises and the like, that if you had first done your duty unflinchingly over the heads of the surgeons, they would in all probability have been converted to physic by the common soldiers and the nurses. You lost a golden chance ;here. As allied to the subject of the drugging of armies, et me commend Homoeopathy to the transport de)artment, on account of the great portability of its means. Two or three chests of drawers would have sufficed to contain the homoeopathic medicines for ;he grand army of Xerxes; exclusively of course of the arnica, rhus, calendula and symphytum, for the wounded. So great a saving of room, so great a convenience of carriage, would have rejoiced the spirit of the conqueror of Scinde, Sir Charles Napier, 117 who abhorred baggage for working troops. On the ground of expensiveness, too, after the men have once been provided with their private medicine chests, Homoeopathy will have greatly the advantage, and Mr. Headland informs me that even with the first supply of chests, it will not be so expensive as the present system. However, were it ten times as costly as the allopathic medical stores, its financial benefits would be preponderant to a degree almost beyond calculation. Nothing so utterly wastes armies as disease. The damages of 12,000 men dead, and 18,000 hors dv combat under Allopathy ; and which make reinforcements brought from 3,000 miles distance continually needful, can hardly be estimated. In fact, it is these things that constitute the bulk and burden of National Debts. And accordingly it is easy to see, that the adoption of Homoeopathy by the British Government will lighten the grievous calls of the tax-gatherer, and make every house in the kingdom richer.* It alone will help my Lord * I extract from the Fourth Annual Report of the London Homoeopathic Hospital the following as bearing on this subject : — " The legislatures of two of the most important States of the American Union (Pennsylvania and Ohio) have granted Charters of Incorporation to Homoeopathic Universities ; the Chambers of the Kingdom of Bavaria, of the Grand Duchy of Baden, and other German States, have authorized Professorships of Homoeopathy in the public Universities ; the Imperial Government of Austria has instituted a Professorship of Homoeopathy, and sanctioned the establishment of Homoeopathic Hospitals in different parts of its dominions ; in Berlin and Moscow similar hospitals exist ; and one hundred beds in the Hospital of St. Marguerite (a branch of the Hotel Dieu, in Paris) are devoted to patients who are openly treated on the homoeopathic system, by Dr. Tessier and his hospital assistants. " When the Bavarian Parliament and the Hungarian Diet, in 1843, 118 Raglan " to bring into the field every available soldier," and enable him to dispense in great part with the necessity of sending home continual calls for reinforcements, each man of whom costs £150. To know the length and breadth of financial and other function which pertains to you, Sir Benjamin, you have only to recall what a single medical discovery, lemon-juice for scurvy, has done for the navies of the world : and to multiply this by the other diseases which Homoeopathy will enable you similarly to extinguish. To refresh your memory, and help your deductions, I will quote from Elliotson's Practice unanimously agreed to recommend the merits of Homoeopathy to the favorable consideration of their respective Governments, it was shewn, — " Ist. That, in Germany, the mortality in homoeopathic hospitals was not quite 6 per cent., whereas in allopathic hospitals it amounted to more than 12 per cent. " 2nd. That in severe inflammation, the mortality in allopathic hospitals was nearly 15 per cent., and in homoeopathic hospitals not quite 5 per cent. " 3rd. That in cholera, the mortality in allopathic hospitals was 56, and in homoeopathic hospitals under 33 per cent. " 4th. That the average number of days which the patients remained in the hospital was twenty-eight to twenty-nine in allopathic, and from twenty to twenty-four days in homoeopathic hospitals ; and " sth. That in homoeopathic hospitals the charge for each patient is nearly half the expenditure for each patient in allopathic establishments."* * " We must, however, bear in mind that this saving in money is a double or a threefold benefit, for by shortening the time of the confinement of a patient, while it saves the contributors the expense of his maintenance, it likewise restores him sooner to his family, who may be, and probably are, reduced to great straits by his disability to earn their food, and it gives a vacancy in the establishment for the relief of some other patient, who would otherwise be excluded from want of room. For the want of funds and the want of room, not the want of patients, fix the limits to the relief of the sick poor in this country." — Appendix of Physic a short passage on this one memorable achievement of public healing : — " The great cause of this disease," says Dr. Elliotson, " appears to be the want of fresh animal and fresh vegetable food. It is on this account that the disease was formerly very common at sea ; for, at one period, sailors were supplied with nothing but salt provisions. So badly were ships formerly provided for, and so faulty was the general management, that in the year 1726, when Admiral Hosier sailed to the West Indies with seven ships, he buried his ship's company twice ; and then died himself of a broken heart. Deaths to the amount of eight or ten a-day took place, formerly, in a moderate ship's company. The bodies, after being sewn up in hammocks, were washed about the deck, for want of sufficient strength, on the part of survivors, to throw them overboard. Lord Anson, in the year 1741, lost one half of his crew, by scurvy, in six months. Out of nine hundred and sixtyone men who sailed with him, only three hundred and thirty-five were alive at the end of the year ; and at the end of the second year, only seventy-one were fit for the least duty ; — not to say duty, but for the least duty. Sir B-t Blame says that the disease used to appear in six or seven weeks from the beginning of sea- " The effects of lemon-juice on the disease are speedy and wonderful ; — so wonderful, that the compiler of ' Lord Anson's Voyage,' after describing the disease, and the horrors which took place from its ravages, says that the cure of such a complaint seems impossible, by any remedy, or any management, that can be employed. Scurvy was formerly set down, without hesitation, as an incurable disease; — not only as a disease incurable then, but as 120 PRICELESS WORTH OF ONE SPECIFIC. being so formidable in its nature, that it never would be cured ; and yet, in almost every case, we can now cure it with the utmost facility." " So great is the effect of this remedy, that you will find the following passage in Sir W. Herschel's work, published in Dr. Lai'dner's Cyclopaedia, on the cultivation of the physical sciences. 'At present, the scurvy is almost completely eradicated in the navy ; — partly, no doubt, from an increased and increasing attention to general cleanliness, comfort, and diet ; but mainly from the constant use of a simple and palatable beverage, — the acid of lemon, served out in daily rations. If the gratitude of mankind be allowed on all hands to be the just meed of the philosophic physician, to whose discernment in seizing, and perseverance in forcing it on public notice, we owe the great safeguard of infantile life ; it ought not to be denied to those whose skill and dismmination have thus strengthened the sinews of our most powerful arm, and obliterated one of the darkest features, in one of the most glorious of all professions,' " Now ponder this well, Sir Benjamin, and let me remind you that cuprum will do for cholera, arnica for wounds, rims for wettings, and rhus and bryonia for fevers, that same saving which lemon-juice has effected for scurvy : saving of life, saving of cash, saving of the material power and glory of Great Britain : saving also of Medical Humanity. But, Sir, we have yet one more scene to visit together, connected with all we have previously witnessed : a home scene, Sir Benjamin ; and we must now ascend a mountain of pity high enough to command the dewy extense of three kingdoms. From thence we have to look down from every point of our warm hearts with a sight as multifold as the cherubic a 121 eyes. We are to see with equal penetration through the diverse thickness of castles, mansions and cottages, through London and through hamlet, at young wives and aged mothers, little children, brothers and sisters — all groups and ties that are ; and at affianced maidens, ties that were to be. There are rents and tears to-day in the general life : the bulletin of the dead has come, and the groups of sorrow are constituted. Splendid Paris bends as a Niobe or as a Rachel while the corse of her much enduring Hero is borne to the marble Invalid es; other corses go earthwards with a shorter procession, helped away by the spades of ruder but more instant sculptors : the rucked sod of the Alma is their urn and monument in one ; yet every warrior among them is also buried to-day with swelling greatness of obsequies, if we could see them, in the everlasting ruby vaults of some human heart. You are touched, Sir Benjamin, and are justly religious on this summit. Struck down for a moment from worldliness, we both discourse without an after-thought on the immortal state : we hope that the brave are already welcomed in the land of peace : that the laurels they could not stop to take, and the earned promotion they seem to have missed, are clad upon them now by the God of battles in front of the shining armies of the just. "VVe hope also that if their voices could now speak to the mourners they have left, the oil of their sure gladness would heal our faithless sorrow. It is a true strain no doubt, and yet but of momentary power. Recovered a little from weakness and spirituality, Sir Benjamin, you ask me what all this undoubted 122 GRIEF HAS ITS TIDES. matter has to do with our present relation ? I will tell you, — all those sorrowing hearts are your patients. They may not have called you in, but you have called yourself in as health minister to the British community; and all general and calculable casualties in the human frame, in their healing are your vocation. You are Emperor of the Bills of Mortality ; every week they issue from your palace. Each day is a battle of the Alma; every common death leaves a wounded family in your medical charge. This bulletin has done nothing but in the way of a little more suddenness than usual : the shock has been speedier ; hopes of friends have died in a moment instead of expiring in months : the malady of cannon balls has told quicker on the fallen and on the survivors than other diseases. But it is only a difference of degree. Similar patients, thousands weekly from London alone, have been crying out to your Board of Health since its first inauguration. eippeal to the doctors about you, unusually grave day, by their human commiseration, to tell you what to do for this piteous bleating flock of your shorn countrymen. Remind them that grief strikes and shatters the body, and that they have given you to understand that the ailing body is their business. Observe to them that if they cannot staunch the rushing sorrow in the mind, which you do not expect from them, they may cancel its eating effects upon the physical organization. Recall to them that you have read in old books, of philtres for love, and medicines for sorrow, and beseech them if that tradition be now overpast in the strides of science. Pray them then for the better gift that has come g2 123 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. instead. Tell them that woe deranges hearts of flesh ; that it sends dire dead apathy into the cordial nerves ; that for long years after such sorrows, those who have forgotten to mourn still feel cold lumps of ice instead of the cheerful pieces of their breasts, and walk with half alive frames and vitals, because the blood springs have been frost nipt. Ask them whether this, and the beginning of this, be not as much within their province, as hypertrophy with dilatation, or disease of the semilunar valves. If they have nothing to answer you, Sir Benjamin, and above all if they smile and commence to leer, come out of the midst of them, for they are doomed doctors. If you stay where they are, you will catch flintiness out of their ribs. And yet I am too certain there is not a word in them, else they would have said it long ago. They have fallen upon another direction : Augjea, not Hygeia, is their chosen path. Let them be committed to the sewers for life, with The Times and Dr. Fungus Kantanker of The Atherusum fording the inky drains at their head, seated one behind the other n paper caps on Mr. Chadwick's pony. You and I are now the clearer for Homoeopathy. Benign as usual, apt as usual in resources, gathering up as usual the cures and pearls of the whole medical past, ull of new observation and old witnesses of common sense in man's wonderful body, the art which sprang )y providence from Hahnemann's front, comes armed and equipaged to the door of the national sorrow. The bodily grief shall be chastened ; it shall pass away without scathing the vessel ; wailing shall have ts decent time, and then shall be exchanged for 124 work : the tears shall flow fast, but shall not eat the guarded cheeks : the man shall follow his brother to the tomb, and then, unspoilt, shall proceed by the spiritual tracks of industry here to follow him in the spiritual life : God's armies on the material shore shall keep tramp and pace with His parallel whitesailed fleets on the eternal ocean. The doctrine of the true medicine shall do for the body what the faith and sight of the Christian effect for the soul. That earthwardness of the frame which bending sorrow makes, and which continues itself into disease, shall be raised upright again ; just as the fruitless regrets of the mind are redeemed into manliness and womanliness by the consolations of religion. The strict bodily side of this, in its general aspects, is what the Health Minister owes to the people : it is the sweet accompaniment to your bitter Bills of Mortality; and I will now tell you the beginning of how to manage it. There is a plant, Sir Benjamin, which grows in the Par islands of the Eastern seas, and which, in the Homoeopathic giving, is a most sovereign remedy against the injuries of sorrow : that plant is termed ignatia amara ; a plant bitter like sorrow itself, and ike good sorrow of infinite beneficence in its intentions. If there had been a Board of Healing, that Board, with the bulletin, would have recommended to all whom it might concern to mix a dozen globules of the sixth dilution of ignatia in a wineglass of water, and to take a teaspoonful of the tasteless and larmless mixture three or four times a day for two or three weeks. That issue of directions would have )een the medical collect for the occasion. But few of those heaviest struck would do it for themselves, 125 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. because grief is absorbing, but the more erect members of the afflicted families would press it upon the attention of the rest, representing to them that all duty required them to provide for their future prospects of health ; especially since the loss of the family's strong arm, in a father, or a husband or brother slain, added to the call of strength which would be made on the remainder. In this way, perhaps by little and little, the use of this invaluable drug would be propagated. The same would apply to the deaths of each week; and to those which every post may bring as the upshot of our future battles. If you had known and done this part of your functions, we should more seldom hear such histories as this : "Mrs. So and So never held up her head again after the intelligence of her son's death : Miss Blank died of a broken heart when her lover was killed : the old mother of Lieut. P. never smiled more after she heard the fatal news." I might multiply these cases to any extent ; they are a common bodily fruit of the battle of life ; and the numbers crippled and carried downwards, and slain outright in this way, is a matter only to be known by those who have a large acquaintance with the diseases of the people. Death in this way engenders death among the proper living ; the crops of wounded, bruised, and broken hearts come as regularly in this mortal world as crops of grass ; for all flesh is grass for the Old Mower. Providence has sown broadcast general remedies for this general disease ; simple and applicable to each day's processions of mourners. Of these remedies there are many, but Ignatia is perhaps the first. I can tell you from abundant practice that it is of a true effi- 126 BOARD OF HEALTH SCOUTS IGNATIA. cacy. Sometime ago, Sir Benjamin, I received by post a most lugubrious looking letter : like the very billet of an undertaker. I had lost a good relation just before, and on breaking the large sable seal, lo ! and behold ! a sympathetic house in Regent Street had sent me a catalogue of all mourning. I could have dived into black by that list down to very Cimmeria, and come up death's own chimney sweep. It struck me as a remarkable coincidence, that just on that] day that commercial house should divine my loss, and proffer its answerable livery. I then recollected that my relative's passage out of life had appeared in that morning's Times, and I began to put two pieces of an event together. On comparing notes with others, I discerned at length that the proprietors of that establishment consulted the newspapers every day, and sent their mourning list to all the directions in which deaths were chronicled. Very decent, spirited, and tradesmanlike ! The thought then occurred to me, that that shop knew and did its business a great deal better than the Board of Health, which with an exhaustive knowledge of the families in which current deaths have happened, never yet sent a single recommendation to the people, availing to obviate the general maladies that come of sorrow. Perhaps you will tell me the doctors ought to manage this : but why the doctors ? A general prescription from your hand will apply to the afflicted at once. There will undoubtedly be cases in which other simples will be needed; true medical cases: after so great a number have been cleared away by your Board, a very few skilful Homoeopaths will suffice for the remainder. The registers of the several districts, who 127 are in close relation with your Board, and who wait upon every house in case of death, may form a ready means of carrying out your humane intentions here ; as they do already in the matter of vaccination. There is nothing more impertinent in guarding the public against the injurious consequences of grief, than in ensuring them against those of smallpox.* The one service is only a little higher than the other in the offices of a progressive Ministry of Health. I shall not apologize for being repetitious, Sir Benjamin, for iteration of plain facts unknown to you is my business and my duty ; and therefore I again beg you to observe, that that Homoeopathy despised and rejected of your Board and The Times, is here again the only candidate for the medical service of the State. The medicinal treatment of not one single mental symptom, and of not one bodily affection springing from the influence, emotions, and con- * The reader will do well to keep the instance of vaccination before him, as offering perhaps the solitary specimen in which old physic, instructed here by milkmaids and the common people, has laid firm hold of a Homceopathic practice and law ; for of course vaccination cures one disease by infecting the system with another similar disease. What is the consequence of this certainty depending on a general principle of cure ? Why, that this point of practice comes at once into relation with the Government, being applicable, by the simplest means, to the masses, and to nations. And mark this, wherever a specific is found for maladies which are common, that specific must ultimately come into legislation, and engender laws to ensure its being carried out. This is the plain and pressing interest of every state upon earth ; as attested in vaccination, which is the germ of state-medicine. Homoeopathy has numberless such simple specifics, and it is easy to see that it knocks at the door of Parliament in such a manner as must insure its admission among our statutes, being welcomed there hy the already existing vaccination laws. Allopathy raises no such claim. 128 OLD PHYSIC LEAVES THE MIND OUT. ditions of the mind, has been attempted by old physic. If it had, the prescriptions, judging by all the rest, would be so unmanageable, that you could never commend them to suffering masses of your countrymen : each one would require the presence of a medical man to obviate its own bad consequences, or at any rate to see that it was not carried too far. Allopathy does not even know that another drug, chamomllla, given in globules, will cure a large proportion of the cross tempers of infants and little children, and reduce fractious nurseries to order. It stifles crying with opium. In short, it has neglected specifics altogether ; has made no studies of the effects produced on the mind by drugs ; and is not aware that those medicines that engender in healthy subjects certain tempers, moods, and states, will extinguish, in Homoeopathic doses, those very tempers, moods, and states in individuals morbidly suffering from them. I therefore repeat that, as Health Minister, Homoeopathy is your plan and your system, your sole chance for healing manifestoes, and that at this present, you have no other. I dare say, Sir Benjamin, I shall be accused by the doctors of materialism ; though indeed lam no materialist, but believe in the distinction of man from all matter, and of human life from all other life. Yet it is a fact that drugs do affect the mind, and the study of their effects thereon is most important for the cure of mental and bodily diseases. I shall also be told, in this proposed matter of chastening general griefs, that sorrow is a sharp blessing which does the soul good. But sorrow enough will be left for that after you have done your best. Moreover this is g3 129 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. parallel to the surgeon's remark in The Times, that the horrid smart of the knife is a proper stimulus to the wounded man. I should have thought that the wound itself might have sufficed for the supply of this quickener. But let me not waste my brief hour with you in any more side remarks to the boers of Fogydom. Did it ever occur to you, Sir Benjamin, that the principles of science have done great things for us in this particular age ? That one chief difference be;ween what we are, and what we were, as a material estate, lies in the fact that certain principles have )een discovered, and applied ? It is true, we have not got far towards the world's core, but we have laid lold of facts which themselves stand as principles to many other facts; and thereby we have attained a wide command of consequences. Railroads, telegraphs, steam ships, steam printing, and a hundred other new things, each have their germ in a stroke of genius at some more central power than had before jeen handled, and which, once grasped, became, by ncessant experiment, our servant thenceforth for innumerable behests, — things which before we did not venture to expect. Each of these things has come nto the service of the State, with a readiness exactly n proportion to its importance. By this means the machinery of power in the hands of this Government, las become enormous : heat, electricity, mechanical everage, speed, power over winds and waves, are exercised in the Cyclopean underworld of the State, as f it were a little viceroy of the energies of the earth. And while individual force is at the highest, the sheer brce of the country overtops all private statures of 130 power. As a result, look at the transport of great armies in mighty fleets ; at the steady landing of the myriads ; at the novel strength of every man from the knit strength of the whole ; and then acknowledge that a few principal facts, laboriously worked out, have altered the relation between our race and the planet. Now where, Sir Benjamin, is the corresponding fact in physic ? Medicine is to this Russian war ust where it was to the last great war : with the single exception of disputed chloroform, there is no general difference. It is not an inch nearer to the Bureaus of Government : it has gained no principal facts that it can impart to the state : it has no simplified modes of treatment communicable in a few words from the heads of departments to their subordinates : it saves no greater numbers than formerly from epidemic visitations ; it has achieved no rule of treatment and no unity of opinion among its own professors : in one word, it offers no mechanism of State Healing to the commonwealth. What a disgraceful antithesis it is to the progress of the world ! A profession which, from lack of healing facts, is a rope of sand in this most strong-linked age of time and empire of nature. You may gather together two hundred and fifty doctors in the Crimea, but with every good-will but one on their brave part, they are two hundred and fifty little pebbles, which have no cohesion. For the proverb increases in pomt — doctors differ. How is it possible such a concourse of atoms can have any affinity with the State? You might as well now expect a queen's message to travel by the old coach down to Edinburgh. They are all private incommunicating gentlemen together, Sir Benjamin, and can have nothing to do 131 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. vith your Ministry of Health. That wants new principles, unity, cooperation, association ; such as landed us in the Crimea, and such as, medically applied, will put us on the shores of a desired and promised and of healthful power. Now Homoeopathy is exactly such a State Mechalism as old physic is not. It is general and simple to a Health Minister's hand. He, charged by his aithful Homoeopathic Council, can prescribe in a few vords for whole classes of his subjects. It has one principle on which all its professors are agreed, similia similibus curantur, one fire puts out another's burnng. By this it commands the field of pathology, and makes ever new conquests ; the irremediable disease of to-day is curable to-morrow, because a drug producing a like disease has just been found and proved. ;t is especially applicable to epidemics, in which I nclude for the nonce the casualties of battle, general morbid states of the national mind, ordinary pestiences, and the like : (looked at from your elevation of statistics, it is hard to say what is not epidemic :) and it is so applicable for a good reason, viz., that it las a generalprinciple of cure. It preserves, and not even temporarily injures, during its administration, the efficiency of its patients. It is rapid beyond all brmer precedent in tackling acute diseases, and landing them in speedy convalescence. It is beloved in the nursery and the lying-in chamber, because it is so gentle and so strong. It is dear to the soldier, for t kneels down and serves him the moment he falls on the field of battle. It touches mind equally with body, md is able to give a nation that confidence of having i real elixir in its wallet, that is itself a tower of 132 HOMOEOPATHY SITS WITH THE AGE. strength against disease. It dispenses light to the populations, because it has liberal light in itself. It inspires its professors also with a faith and hope that are the very pulses in the arm of skill : and with a delight in healing, that puts off the doctor's fatigue to the late hours of his day. Sir Benjamin, it is just the thing for you, and most willing to be yours for the service of the British people. You will find that it is " Hail fellow, well met " with steam and progress, light and electricity, and with all the new loves and charities of man, and all his strengths, all over the world. I have hitherto tried to give you a little opening of the new duties which will amount to the constitution of the Board of Healing, and which will be altogether different from those of the present Board of Cleanliness, which will be next to Godliness when it is associated with your own distinctive or Homoeopathic Ministry. At present however your Board of Cleanliness is in a totally false position, co-operating with Allopathy, which dirties as fast as you clean. You and it are like a bad housemaid, which first scrubs and then litters; then scrubs and litters again. Carry your sewage pipes a little higher and finer ; insert one of them by an hour-glass hole into the bottom of the calomel bin, and carry another into the lowest level of the castor oil tank ; and then you will drain away the sources of many a national and individual malady. You will also then be at one with yourself, which is the source and beginning of all action. When your ministry is once well afoot, there is nothing to which I can liken its functions, but to a certain tree promised some day to be planted in a cleared and 133 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. renewed earth, and in a city which comes from above downwards : a tree " which bears twelve manner of fruits, and yields its fruit every month, and the leaves of that tree are for the healing of the nations." For every month you will put forth leaves of cure. The heat of summer and the ice of winter, the malignant east wind, the equinoctial perturbations, the damps and fogs of all English seasons, are a set of general causes with which you will do current battle : and each as it comes will have your comment, and the instructions of your ministry how to meet it. The herbs are growing, Sir Benjamin, and gathered too, which will clothe our human nakedness with immunity as it passes through these destructions of the year, and give it that which is truly human, ixity of principles, and self-maintenance in the midst of the fluxes of nature. You have only to take these lerbs out of the open hand of Homoeopathy ! Besides these causes also, you will attend somewhat carefully to the general seasons of man's life ; for these too are fully perturbed. From teething to toothlessness there are many general maladies which you will treat on your great scale. First comes the infant, mewling, or which you will teach mothers to give homoeo>athic chamomilla, and pewking, for which they will jive similar ipecacuanha, in the nurses arms. Then comes the cutting of teeth, for the pains of which enlargement of powers, they will give again chamomilla, and in hot heads, belladonna ; saving convulsions oftentimes, Sir Benjamin, and piloting the small skiff through quiet tarns. Next the infantine diseases; aconite and pulsatilla for simple measles; mix vomica, ipecacuanha and drosera for whooping 134 DECREES FOR THE HEALTH MINISTER. cough ; and belladonna and mercurius for domestic scarlet fever. You will sympathize especially with growing pains; for you know how bad they are to bear : it has cost your own bones a heavy ache to get them out of the allopathic dwarfing : you know how hard it has been for you to grow from the infinitesimal good of the old school to the gross benefactions of the new : you will therefore publish from your high seat that the young who are expanding with pain and weakness, shall have two globules of calcarea 30 twice a week ; and if in a month they groan still, a globule of phosphoric acid 12 every morning. Next you will have regiments of young damsels under your eye at the age of sweet sixteen, and for these you will order pulsatilla, and if the roses of their cheeks are long in coming, occasional sulphur. At 21, wherever love has not been happy, you will not forget ignatia'. Later on, at and about the ripe Indian summer of woman's 40, and a little after, your general recommendation to that fine age in your subjects, will be sulphur and lachesis. Recollect also that you bear "twelve manner of fruits" — most divers attentions to the people. And in the course of your pilgrimage among their ages, you will now meet with many middle aged gentlemen, otherwise strong, who are in a sad state of confusion, obstruction, and if I may so speak, constipation. They are melancholy victims of your former no-doings : specimens of what Allopathy runs into when it tries to be generous, and to constitute domestic medicine, for its tender mercies are cruel : in short, slaves to the pill-box. Take all these under your wing at once : tell them that this constipation from which they are breathless with running, 135 is an allopathic bugaboo, a turnip with a red lamp in it. They will do you credit. Tell them to burn carefully all their pill-boxes, and to lend you their health for three or four months : also tell them to mix three globules of nux vomica 12 in a wineglass of water, and to take it night and morning for a fortnight. If they are not cured, let them do the like with sulphur 12 : and so on alternately for the three or four months. At the end of that time, you will have a very small percentage of them on the list; and these will come under medical treatment. Now why should you not put that much, for these people, occasionally in the papers, advertising the benignity of your office ? The Morrisons and Culverwells put their pills there for gain; and why not you, your healers, when you have nothing to get by it but the health and blessings of your British flock. The Ministry of Health might present it compliments in that shape without any degradation to that general mass of sufferers. You already approve of a greater interference than this in what you call emergencies, when you order " house to house visitation : " all general forms of sickness are an emergency to the sufferers, and it is therefore both your right and your duty to hunt them out and pursue them, till you convert them into wholeness. In the course of your practice, Sir Benjamin, for you will have such a blessed practice as no physician on earth has even desired, one manner of your fruits vill be especially administered for the eradication of lereditary tendencies and diseases. With the most delicate pipe- work of the science of your Board you will proceed to drain those old swamps and miasms 136 HEA-LTH MINISTER WINS HIS SPURS. ;hat undermine the populations of your country, [tickets and scrofula will come under your decisive engineering. What " the criminal classes" are to the moral state, that these born infants of disease are to he physical humanity; and you will be the Lord Shaftesbury of a new realm of the children of pain. The rags of their poor flesh and bones will be the lospital card of their admission to your bounty ; and >efore they are thought of by their future parents, hey will be precisely cared for in the foundations of your paternal institution. Those great human moasses termed workhouses will begin to be won into ultivation and sanitary propriety by your efforts lere. You will tell these people that the nature of tiings is not all against them ; that there are true substances on their side ; and you will order them for their young rickets two globules of calcarea carbonica 30 in fourteen teaspoonfuls of water, a teaspoonful to be given every morning. This they will continue for weeks, or months, according to benefit: and afterwards they will do the same with sulphur' 30 given in tlje same way : returning upon the calcarea every now and then for another month. You will also order cod-liver oil in half-teaspoonful to the infants, once or twice a day. You will make many bandy egs straight, Sir Benjamin, many too large heads and tomachs healthily compassable, by these incredibly imple means : you will save many a crooked back : and in after life many a case of consumption. Your uccess here will greatly increase your practice, for >y very deeds you will have got into the hearts of the poor. You will also have disembarrassed the doctors of a new set of domestic cases ; and given them time 137 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. for their own real part : a vast advantage for medicine proper, as I can tell you. Nor will the world of your country's industry be omitted from the care of your humane Bishopric of Bodies. You know that in the exercise of daily callings various injuries are apt to occur, by fixed laws, on account of a certain incompatibility existing in nearly every mode of life with the natural requirements of health. One reason of this is, that the great esprit de corps, the fire of industry and commonwealth love, is not sufficiently white within us, to spread over us the full shield of its own immortalities and immunities; in consequence of which our circumstances attack and bite us more than they ought. Earge classes are too sedentary, and work their heads ore in proportion than their bodies; digestion, hich equilibrates the body with the head, suffers "ievously therefor. Many also work in smoke and dust of various kinds, and the organs of breath labor and are in danger. Many too crowd their minds of a day with the cares of fifty years ahead, spend and invade their night's sleep, and become bent and aged in their courage and their nerves. In short, you know well the story of the occupations of the people as affecting the national health. Now for these general causes you will hold medical councils, and as your light comes, issue general prescriptions. Imagine the happiness resulting from your triumphs here ! Your ante-chamber, without a sycophant near it, receiving occasional deputations of the trades which have made Britain what she is : the ninefold Industries of this great people, the Anglo-Saxon Muses, come up to London to give a specimen of their strong quality of 138 THE COUNTRY'S INDUSTRY THANKS HIM. hearty thanks under the window of the Health Minister. Sheffield and Manchester, and the Coal Men Ec Tyne and Wear, and a hundred busy swarms 3S, each grateful for longer averages of life, and :r powers of working ! I scarcely think that the use of the Houses of Parliament to a victorious general can be comparable in its reception to the flush of heart which will be yours, when you thus receive from the vigorous Artisanship of the people, the testimony of gratitude for that expanded health which your adoption of the homoeopathic power and light has enabled you to confer upon the industrial populations of your country. ¦όbtless, Sir Benjamin, you have noticed one Lovelty in my address to you : the intermixture of seemingly great things with seemingly small : things that touch the heart and soul in the one breath, and pilules and globules in the next. That mixture is a doctor's life. He stands in the midst of all pains and all apprehensions, and the agonies of disease, and the solicitude of friends, cannot long keep his unswerving eye from his little bottles. The Prince of Healing, whose minister you are, hears the blind man's prayer : " Lord ! that I might receive my sight :" He stoops down to the ground, and makes clay of spittle, and " purges the visual ray." We too must stoop down to that same ground, for it is the great Pharmacopeia. This profession upon which you are embarked, is the meeting place of the health of the body and the soul, "όbi mystici aguntur conventus, et sacra junguntur fadera." And stooping and rising, stooping and rising, are the native undulations of the medical art. Therefore in 139 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. my singularities of style to you I have not been untrue to man's hill and vale, to the sublimity and lowliness of my subject. I have indeed tried to batter down much, and if I am not mistaken, I have made some of the main square blocks in the old forts of Allopathy chatter in their places, so that they will come down at leisure, with I hope as few doctors injured by their fall as possible. Yet my course is by no means destructive, for I have not only proposed something better and happier for physic itself than the old walled towns by which it now menaces Society, but I have also shewn you in solid vision models of a new ministerial palace for you and a true Board of Health, brighter and ampler, more useful and more commanding, than was ever yet inhabited by a British minister. If you would only take possession, amid the acclamations of the nation, the trumpet-applause of both services, and the far-heard hymning of our patron, St. George, and the sanitary angels ! You will also perceive that I am not cap in hand in your antechamber, and want no place in your counsels. I prefer my freedom of voice, as useful to me beyond even the livery of Her Most Gracious Majesty; and I reserve it untrammelled for the next, and if need be, for many future occasions. For though I abhor scribbling, and sorrow for having done so much of it, yet this crisis is a different matter; and because the Mural Crown is the badge of my race, and healing is my business, I will never be silent when I see the great interests of the country trampled under foot by the hard neglect of those who should know better. Sir Benjamin, I pledge myself not to rest until the snowy standard of 140 HE SUMMONS THE BAND OF HEALTH. Homoeopathy waves over the Ministry of Health, over the Army and Navy, over Printing House Square, and until its telegraphic signals from the head quarters of your New Palace pass far and wide, with healing on their wings, to every the remotest corner of my beloved country. Having said thus much, Sir Benjamin, and I have a right to say it, for you are my member, as well as health minister, I will now proceed to the constitution of the Board of Health, which is the first matter for you now to think of. We have already settled by facts beyond cavil, that your adoption of Homoeopathy is your only chance of having an active system of State Medicine, and therefore of course you do adopt it. The next point is, how to administer it; and plainly this can only be done by a council of Homoeopaths. Old physic will clearly decline all appoint- Inents made in this sense, and decline them ungrudgngly ; because you are not interfering with anything t ever intended to do, or dreamt of as possible, but ibout to perform functions quite new and to it most breign. It will then jog on its own way. Let the appointments therefore be made, and seat around the green baize table such of the chiefs of the homoeopathic power in London as will heartily co-operate with your intentions. I should like to see Dr. Laurie there, because he has done more than any one else perhaps in the world to carry Homoeopathy to mothers and into private families, and to build up the domestic part of it. For the rest, there are many men of great ability who will be able to serve you. I confess it would also please me to have Mr. Brady on the board, because I yet hope that he will be the Luther 141 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. of Homoeopathy in the House of Commons. Allo)aths arc, of course, inadmissible, just as single Homoeopaths would be in a false position in the present Board of Cleanliness. You must make a clean sweep, and not try the dangerous experiment of putting our new wine of life into the old chemists' bottles. If I might make another suggestion, I would advise you, even on the Medical Board, to have at least three in;elligent homoeopathic laymen. Because as you are joing to write directions and prescriptions for the whole laity of the kingdom, these gentlemen will be able to tell you at once whether your instructions are clear and intelligible to them, and presumably therebre to the rest. And as they will be family men, they will represent in that important council the domestic medical wants of the people.* I have called you Emperor of the Bills of Mortality, 3ut in your new robes of healing you will soon cease ;o deserve that title. In the course of a few years ;he rates of death weekly will be so sensibly diminished, partly from the active power of your means of cure, and partly that drugging, bleeding, blistering, and calomelizing will have passed away for ever, that old age will come to be connected with death once more, the doctors will escape finally from Moliere and the comedians, and the decease of mankind will * One obvious part of medical reform embraces the reconstruction of the office of Coroner, which can only be filled properly by a Homoeopath, either lay or medical. For it is clear that Old Physic is so bad a judge of what is Violent Death, that it is incapacitated for an office in which that is the main question. For the same reason, no inquest ought to be considered as valid or transacted without having had the benefit of the testimony of one or more homoeopathic physicians or surgeons. 142 NATURAL DEATH REAPPEARS. je due to Nature and to Providence, whose benignity alone can sustain the credit of it. In the meantime, as life will be longer the state will be stronger, and new colonies to lisp your name and imitate your institutions will proceed out of the loins of your Hygeia of Westminster. Sir Benjamin Hall's saveall — Homoeopathy, will make a present to the British Empire of the population of a large capital city every year. four functions will thus come to be associated exclusively in men's minds with the constant topping of )irths over deaths, in short with life and the living ; and your Bills shall then change their name, and shall be called the Bills of Nativity. Besides all my other reasons, Sir Benjamin, I see ground for knowing that these great changes are imminent, not only in the present crisis of war and cholera (which indeed proclaim a summa dies et ineluctabile tempus for old physic), but also in what I would term a chronic crisis which has been gradually revealing itself to all thinking mortals. So much is expected from every man now, so much work, and so much facing of his subject, so much turning over of the golden minutes, that he has not time for the indulgences and the neglects of former days. We cannot afford to sit at our dinner tables tippling port wine by the hour together, when we have headwork to do this evening, and busy to-morrow in prospect. Neither have we leisure for the calomel, salts and senna of our ancestors. Function is altogether too rapid for such rust as this to come into it. None but gentlemen of fortune and consummate indolence have a right to these fads. There is an anecdote which I have always found very prophetic on this 143 score j of Earl Howe, I think ; who feeling himself one day indisposed in his cabin, and living before the days of Hahnemann, incontinently took a black draught. He gave himself up to be useless for the next three days. Suddenly a strange sail, perhaps many strange sails, hove in sight, and rapidly came nearer. He was summoned on deck, saw likelihood of work, ran straight to the side of the ship, exclaimed, "By God, this '11 never do," put his finger down his throat, and shot the black draught into the sea. This admiral is here a mythos of Britain and Allopathy. And looking from the hint of him, I have known that as the country gets busier and busier, it will spew that whole system out of its mouth.* That time has come ; the industrial iron is hot ; our duties increase with every morning that we rise from our beds ; the enemy of inaction is in sight ; and Neptune is waiting over The Britannia's bulwarks for Old Physic. Your statistical tables of mortality under the new Board, instead of being dry diagrams upon which the barrenness of medical art is exhibited every week, will come to throb with scientific and humanitary interest ; and year after year the comparison between * This morning I had a confirmation of the truth of this as applicable especially to the industrious artisan. A good woman consulted me for her husband, who has a bad cough. Two days ago he went to " the club doctor," who prescribed him an ounce of salts. " This '11 never do," was his wife's thought, so she came to me, told her story, and wound it up by saying (the italics are her own), " The idea of giving a working man an ounce of salts." This matter of Allopathy, by the bye, is a vital thing as connected with finance for Benefit Clubs : they will improve their incomes, and increase their stability, vastly, by calling in the homoeopaths. 144 THE EARTH CHIMES IN. them will be most precisely instructive. You will find some large items of death almost struck out of your list by Homoeopathy ; pneumonia and fever, whooping cough, measles and scarlatina, will cease to occupy their present gross places, and your relations of numbers will be altogether changed. You will know the tools that have worked this clearance, and will then proceed by all public invitation and encouragement, to seek for specifics for the more intractable parts of your statistics ; to dig out the old malignant stumps of disease. Homoeopathy will date much of its own progress from your exact registrations and crying requirements. It is true no government can create a Hahnemann, no premium evoke or encourage him, and no applause from senates or sovereigns make him work one jot harder than he does for the good of his kind. But then, though seeds and geniuses come from God, cultivation, which also comes from Him, makes their generations proceed, and their works universal. And your Ministry of Health will have vast opportunities of expanding and enlarging the Homoeopathic Powers. On questions of medicines you will avoid one fault which, like the wolves of hunger and poverty, has ruthlessly pursued old physic : you will listen to the voice of simple populations of remote places and rural districts, when they tell you of their herbs and their simples, and of the cures which their "irregular" good old women and good old men have performed in their houses. By this means, like giant Antaeus, you will get a shoot out of nature's veins of strength, by touching the medical earth again : Hygeia will bloom in cheek and fire in eye by sometimes breath- n 145 ng her native country air among the rustics and 'illage maidens ; for you will then find oui that medicine has her birthplace in these unsophisticated abodes ; and that the best things in the proud Pharmacopoeia are nothing but the tangled and matted ops of which herbs and simples are the root. Think what a dominion of enquiry is here, for a Health Ministry and a British Government, which has lands and gardens and ancient populations under its sway in every climate of the globe. I have often heard it regretted by intelligent officers in our Indian army, that the medical corps in Hindostan will obstinately enow nothing of the plants and simples made use of )y the native doctors and simplers, for no one who s not M.D., or M.R.C.S.E., has a medical existence in their eyes. But following Bacon you will take stock of all this unlearned knowledge, which ever has been the valuable raw material out of which science and cures are made. You need only set this on foot, Sir Benjamin, by a hint to the lay members of the British army, and an invitation to British subjects in all parts of the world ; and within a year or two you shall enter a new world of medicinal substances, shall extend the laboratory of every vegetable chemist at home, and shall lay a basis for new physic which )oth in solidity and amplitude will far surpass that of Dioscorides. You will then be on a level with the age on other great branches recently constituted, and the )eautiful lineaments and landscapes of physical geography will have their humane double in that which specially pertains in a medical sense to this swelling Anglo Saxon life, Oceanic* or Geographical Physic. * T borrow this word " oceanic" as a formula from one of the most 146 You will also see now, Sir Benjamin, that there is uch a thing as State Medicine, and that it is a most active industrial summit of the healing art, which receives from the art and science of Homoeopathy its specific powers, and gives them, according to the importance of the case to the nation, either the stringency of legislative acts, or else the high patronage and recommendations of the Health Ministry. Vaccination for small-pox, and lemon-juice for scurvy, are the types of its twin departments. You can hardly fail to have put together in your mind some of the timbers and rafters of this great institution. State Medicine hitherto has been confounded with Police Medicine, or Medical Jurisprudence ; but that is another as big mistake as confusing the Board of Health with the Board of Cleanliness. State Medicine heals the masses, as such : it can have no other meaning. It helps virtue, skill, industry, economy, strength. Police Medicine hounds murderers and ferrets poisoners, where ordinary evidence fails to net or to track them. It assists the lawyers and Jack Ketch. There is as great a difference between the two, as between the Old Bailey and a royal palace ; or as between old physic and Homoeopathy. There is an ancient story, Sir Benjamin, which I never think of without Homoeopathy rushing into my head at the same time. It is from the Scandinavian remarkable books of our time, Smith's Divine Drama of History and Civilization. To Britain, according to this book, belongs the inauguration of a new providential epoch, which is no longer Judaean, Greek, Roman, or French— no longer national and mediterranean, but planetary, universal, or, as he beautifully calls it, oceanic. If this mission be ours in other things, is it not also our part to constitute the beginning of integral or oceanic physic ? 147 mythology, and tells us of the build and convenience, and of the qualities, of the ship of the gods. That ship is called Skidbladnir, Sky-leaf or blade, or perhaps Sheath-leaf; it was made by certain dwarfs, and was by them given to the god Frey, the god of seed and abundance. It was made of so many pieces, and with so much art, that when it was not wanted for sailing, it would fold up together like a kerchief, and Frey could put it in his pocket. When it was wanted by the gods, he took it out of his pocket, and carefully unfolded it, putting first one foot into it; pliant then, he could put his second foot in : and when his feet were in, he could get into it himself. No sooner was one man in it, than two could get in ; and when two were in, three and four ; and so on more and more, until the entire array of Valhalla, god and heroes, could swarm over and into its spacerespiring sides. When the full-armed host was on joard, as soon as the sails were hoisted, the ship had air wind, and went whithersoever it was steered. When done with for that time, it went in by like stages exactly as its crew of gods left it ; and by the time they were all on shore again, Frey had it beween thumb and finger, retired into a mere purse of a ship, and replaced it quietly in his pocket. That ship is the first way of telling us of Homoeopathy, and you are to be the god Frey, the happy possessor of it. The freightage which it carries is the basis of the godlike in man, the health of the human family. It is made by the dwarfs, for these are the secret principles of science, working away in the smithies of the underworld, but privileged at length to present their completed industry to the fruitful daylight 148 ANCIENT WISDOM SPEAKS. powers. It lies at first like a pinch between the apprehensive fingers, for it has a principle, similia similibus curantur, so curt as to occupy but a single cell in our intelligence ; but the principle is a practice also, and no sooner is it wanted, than it opens like a huge airy fanship, and most unlike the crampribbed allopathic luggers, and embraces all needs and departments of healing. Sick armies and navies one after another lie snugly bedded in crews, regiments and legions, in its comprehensive berths. The wind of success which lives within its sails, is no other than the harmony of nature and truth, which lends itself to immediate Occasions. But when its hospital wards are empty, it again shuts up, and is nothing to the public eye. I think you will acknowedge, Sir Benjamin, that the old Rune Men saw lomoeopathy, together with many other true principles and practices, from a kind of mythical Pisgah, vhen they launched that simple infinitesimal ship, and undeterred by its first size, put Valhalla within ts hospitable ribs. They meant for you there a pracical lesson, in the convenient minuteness of priniples, in the elasticity of art, in the success of true lature, in the little cost of real skill ; in the humble unobtrusiveness of the best means after their work is one. The homoeopathic medicine chest of the new Ministry of Health is undoubtedly that ship sailing now into the port of London, and its instructions to iling populations are the voyages which your gods and heroes are to make through this ocean of time. Speaking of Skidbladnir, " the best of ships," reminds me also of the wolf Fenrir, who was the worst of wolves. Of him it is also written in northern h 2 149 Runes, and as Homoeopathy is prefigured in what happened to him, I will also tell you a little about him. He came by a monstrous kind of birth from Loki, the god of mischief; he was very small at first when he was brought out of the chaos of giants to Valhalla, where he was fed by the unwitting gods ; but he grew so much every day, and the seers foretold such ruin from him, that the gods got a strong chain made with which to bind him. The wolf saw that he was more than a match for it, allowed it to be put on, and with one struggle and spurn burst it in pieces. The gods prepared now a second fetter half stronger than the first ; but out of this also Fenrir shook himself in no time. The first chain was the band of fraud, the second was the band of material force; but neither of these bit him. The gods were now alarmed at his prowess, and they sent down Frey's messenger to the country of the dark elves, again to certain dwarfs, and had a chain made termed Gleipnir, or Gulper. It was smithied of six things, — of the footfalls of cats, and of the beards of women, and of the roots of stones, and of the sinews of bears, and of the breath of fish, and of the spittle of birds. This Gleipnir was fine and limber as a silken thread. The wolf, with great reluctance, and exacting a heavy pledge, allowed it to be put upon him ; it mastered and gulped him in the wrestle, and held him in its elastic belly for a thousand years. Fenrir, you perceive, the wolf which we all have to keep from the door, is disease. The first treatment of the monster, who grows up among and at the expense of our godlike powers, is naturally by fraud ; we try to cheat disease and death with all strong 150 THE WOLF IS BOUND. diversions ; but they grow in spite of these, and even acquire head and power in overcoming the false chain Lading or stealth. The body and substance of our enemy being recognized, the second chain with which we would cabin him, is violence, his quality; and from this false force also he dashes with ease, feeding on our rashness as his own hay. For he is said to dash out of the fetter Dromi, which means our tight squeezing ; whereby we force disease into new conquests, and as the people say, drive it in. The fetter effectual, Gleipnir, the gulper of disease, comes out of dwarf-land, the underworld of the sciences, in fact, Germany, and it is made of impalpables, magnetisms and decillionths, and called Homoeopathy : a dynamical scientific power. The rune book says : " Thou mayest have seen that women have no beards, and that no pat falls from the tread of cats, and that there are no roots under stones ; but then, on the other hand, by my troth I know that all I have said is equally true (with thy no sight) , though there may be some things that thou art not of might to experience." This signifies the impossibility and improbability of Homoeopathy, the nothingness of it ; and at the same time its power and its fact. I don't know that it would be possible to put its case into a clearer relation to itself and its predecessors, valetudinarian fraud, and allopathic force, than in this old myth ; which stands written for your instruction in one of the earliest records of the Gothic race. And now, quitting stories, Sir Benjamin, I hope that in your old age (which may God and Homoeopathy long put off and protract), when this Marylebone has been resigned, and your palace of health is occu- 151 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. jied by your successor, you will write a final Bridgewater Treatise, as the legacy of your faithful life and ;he record of your providential experiences, for the lome archives of the British people. The wisdom, )ower, and goodness of God displayed in the creaion ! No longer the anatomical muscles and tendons of the human hand, but the living Divine Palmistry tself is your theme. The revelation of God to man, n the great healing power as it wells from God. You vill show that the smallest drops of the life of nature, vices beyond all eyes to see, have each their preiestined and most manifold play of charities for the human constitution. That man is put down upon a planet made by an Everlasting Physician, — a globe whose flints, chalks, and sulphurs are to repair the old depth of his diseases, and whose plants grow for our casualties, and to palliate the trembles and pains that seasonably arise out of the stem of our weakness. You will shew that poisons are run through with goodness, and that serpents are emblems and processes of eternity in this also, that life for the ailing mainsprings of life lies under their well-appointed fangs.* You will shew that water and air are great pharmacopoeias, as holding the world of medicaments in solution : the air columns of each parish for itself, and the boundless envelope for us all. You will stand in wonder among the peaks and spits of the electric laws, and will surmise that they also are medically precise; that they pierce the flashing heavens that * Let me give my mead of praise to Dr. Rutherford Russell, for in- Eig Cobra poison as a homoeopathic remedy in diseases of the f the heart. It is a marvel which will yet tell upon the statisles of the Ministry of Health. 152 THE HEALTH MINISTER ON PISGAH. health may come down. In evidence of all this you will look with humble satisfaction at the long unrolling of your statistics. Like a river getting purer and purer, they run from the muddy beginnings of pestilence and disease, by their own virtue dissolve their grievous freight, and tend us into the desired haven and sea of a clear and common old age. The human land of Providence, Sir Benjamin, the vein-work and sinew-work of God's mercies, is seen, and will be more and more seen, in this grand correspondence of nature with our wants, and your wants; in this medical sufficiency of the universe to the primal creature. If you please it shall be the last theme that the first Health Minister of this kingdom, as he stands on the great brink, shall rehearse for our children's children. Yet long before this day comes, you will have the clergy of these realms on the side of Homoeopathy, which has opened to you and the nation all this intelligence, and all these substantial blessings. Already in great part they have comprehended the large divinity of their mission ; and many a parish has its )riest, and many a dissenting flock its minister, who ike our Master, dispenses healing to both the body and the soul. Allopathy laughs at this, as it would at " the clay made with spittle." But the ministers of religion know their work, and do not take counsel of man; and I leave the cause in their hands and God's, with entire confidence in the result. Minister of Health, and my dear Countrymen, and Countrywomen, lam done. I have written to you in haste, as it were between bedside and bedside, in the intervals of urgent duties. Imperious haste! For Old 153 THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. Physic is felled to the ground by the double-headed hammer of war and pestilence. There it lies., blessed be God ! " Violence/ saith the Psalmist/ is hunted :o overthrow, and destructions come to a perpetual end." But then there also lie wounded and cholerasmitten legions, biting the dust, and no one nigh to help them. I tried to do my part by a voice for Homoeopathy in the Leading Journal. It choked my voice. Nothing was left me but to quit my loved privacy, and appeal in my own smallness to you and yours. With no spite to any man, but with indignation against a vile system, and grief for its victims, I cry aloud to you. Will you then listen to facts for yourselves, and force the tardy Government and the Ministry of Health to send out efficient succor to jleeding and dying brothers who bleed and die for you ? Will you insist upon a great and immediate approval and appointment of Homoeopathy ? I ask not for its trial, but for its adoption ; for it has been tried, and it has succeeded, through half a century. Recollect, you cannot shift the responsibility now to the shoulders of Old Physic : incapable of all action, t cannot carry for you a straw of the burden that eadens your conscience. It can no more help you to an opinion on this matter, than it can open the graves of your kinsmen whom it lets die by sea and and, and bid them live again. You must act for yourselves, asking no question of Medical Boards, vhose sentiments as well as practices you know too veil already. Above all, you must not diplomatize with Old Physic, which is the quick Ally of Death and Brother of Pestilence. Time presses. Cholera and wounds have no medical treatment. We are on 154 ;he eve of great battles, and each of them is fought under the horrors of unrelenting diseases. You have opportunity still to save thousands of lives, and to >revent miseries incalculable. Contribute openmindedness, courage, and human love, as well as money, to the Patriotic Fund. Answer your Queen by giving two mites ; one, all your soul, the other, all your substance. Now is your accepted time, now is your day of salvation. 155 APPENDIX. AM pleased to add the name of the distinguished Dr. Charge, of Marseilles, to those who make it their business ;o instruct the laity in medical practice. In the Preface n the Ninth Edition of his Traitement Homoeopathique \hervatif et curatif dv Cholera Epidemique. Instruction opulaire, pouvant servir de Guide en V absence dv Medecin. Vlarseille, 1854 ; he says, " J'ecris, cette fois, pour les malades et afin de leur 6tre vraiment utile, je dirai cc qu'il st essentiel de connaitre." At p. 6, " Tout le monde, ans itre medecin, pent et doit guerir le cholera, graces d 'Homoeopathic. . . . Dcs 1849 j'esperai le plus grand bien c cette Instruction Populaire ; aujourd'hui fort de temoigages nombreux, j'affirme que, par le secours seul de cc ravail, les gens dv monde ont gueri un tres-grand nombre de choleriques. . . . Cette affirmation nest autre chose que 'expression affaiblie de la plus stricte verite, et pourtant 'est elle gui a revolte le plus les medecins de Vancienne cole." This pamphlet shews that Homoeopathy has been pplied with great success by Dr. Cabrol (physician to the ate Marshal St. Arnaud) to the cholera which raged among le French troops at Varna. Ma £0* w— o /jrv#* 3 0 ~~ I