WC262
W686w
1855
MffiOPATHY.
t
Presented in honor of Solon Ri chard Boynton , Sr . , M . D .
COLLEGE OF OSTEOPATHIC PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS • LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
WAR, CHOLERA,
AND THE
MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
AN APPEAL TO SIR BENJAMIN HALL AND THE .BRITISH PEOPLE.
BY
JAMES JOHN GARTH WILKINSON, M. D.,
AUTHOR OF "THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS CONNECTION WITH MAN.'
PRO CIVIBUS SERVANDIS.
FROM THE LONDON EDITION,
PUBLISHED BY
OTIS CLAPP, AND CROSBY, NICHOLS, & CO., BOSTON.
WILLIAM RADDE, AND FOWLERS & WELLS, NEW YORK.
RADEMACHER & SHEER, AND BOERICKE & TAFEL, PHILADELPHIA. TRUMAN & SPOFFORD, AND E. MENDENHALL, CINCINNATI.
MORTON & GRISVVOLD, LOUISVILLE. Also, by Booksellers and Periodical Dealers generally, throughout the TJ. States.
1855.
CONTENTS
o* J. J. G. WILKINSON'S WORK
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
Old Physic has the Cholera, 4
The Doctors directing Physic, 9
Homoeopathy succeeds admirably, 12, 13
The old Bogs of Allopathy, 14
Fatal Decrees of Allopathy, 15
Moral Fragrance of the Times, 16
Most crumpled up, 18
Great Acquaintances, 19
The expectant School expecting, 21
Allopathy's Comnlaints, 22
The Horrors of Decillionths, 24
Allopathy envies Fancy, 26, 27
Allopathy troubles Consciences, 29
Homoeopathy tackles acute Diseases, 31 Only one Way of trying Homoeopathy, 33
Hahnemann creates Materia Medica, 35 What Hahnemann has done, 37, 38, 39
Old Physic pesters Parliament, 41
My Medical Bill, 43
Medical Toleration, 415
Medical Free Trade, 47, 48
Medicine uncramped, 49, 50
The Lawyers find out Old Physic, 51
Homoeopathy lays Hands on Surgery, 52
Burgeon Herbs unknown to Surgeons, 53
The Poor freed from Hobson's Choice, 55, 56
Old Physic and the Laughter Cure,
57
Homoeopathy calls Witnesses, 58, 59, 60 Agitation not good for Conservatism, 61, 62 Mothers' Prospects look up, 63
Nurses in the Witness Box, 64
A Lady's Contumacy, 65
Master dismisses Old Physic, 66, 67
What a Board of Healing is and does, 69,70,71 Spurs for Doctors, 72
Old Physic dreads skilful Mothers, 73
Homoeopathic Khus stops 30,000 Colds, 74
Board of Health ignores Ehus, 76
Arnica tends wounded Thousands, 78, 79 Homoeopathy prevents Cholera, 80
Board of Health ignores Homoeopathy, 81 Homoeopathy cures Cholera, 82
Homoeopathy cures Sea-sick Armies, 83, 84 Homoeopathy curea Ague and Fever, 85, 86 Arnica cures the Moil of Fatigue, 87, 88 Old Physic can't give General Orders, 89, 90 Homoeopathy can give General Orders, 91 Woman and Homoeopathy, 92, 93, 94
Doctor Elizabeth BlackweU, 95
The Ladies in the Field, 96, 97, 98, 99
Florence Nightingale, 100
Doctor Smith's Beatitudes, 102
Old Physic against the Russians, 103, 4 The Pharisee butters his Victim, 105, 6
The more Haste the worse Speed, 107, 8 Old Physic spends Four Million of ours, 109
Priceless Worth of one Specific, 113, 14
Grief has its Tides, 115, 16
Ignatia heals Wounds of Sorrow, 117, 18
Old Physic leaves the Mind out, 119, 20
Old Physic leaves the World out, 121
Homoeopathy sits with the Age, 122
Decrees for the Health Minister, 123
Health Minister wins his Spurs, 124
The Country's Industry thanks him, 125
He summons the Board of Health, 128
Natural Death reappears, 129, 30
The Earth chimes in, 131
State Medicine is born, 132
Ancient Wisdom speaks, 133
The Wolf is bound, 134
The Health Minister on Fisgah, 135
Only let us do our Duty, 137 Appendix.
WAB, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF
HEALTH.
SIR, AND MY COUNTRYMEN,
1. Public casualties open the world's heart and eyes, insure the |X progress of decent fairness, bring mankind to books, 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 rig! 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 inflic- tion laid on ?
2. 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
o which I shall try to bring home to you, in order that their special repentance, and a regeneration thereafter, may be insured. Other re- pentances are urged by other appointed voices, and to them also let us respond, Amen.
3. 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 protec-
^ tion and defence. Yet there is not one of them but supports a con- tinual siege against its own times and peoples; and what is termed reform is always accompanied by the razing of some part of their out- works, 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 ne- cessity, which identifies these towers of the past with our straightness, our evils, and our sins ; and preaches a brave, God-fearing self-reli- ance, and a fresh appeal to the sword of our spirits in the great Battle of Facts. The medical profession, with its black, innumerable dun- geons, 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.
4. The medical profession, as such, is confessedly powerless in the presence of cholera. Medical science itself has the disease in its most virulent form. Not a remedy keeps upon its irritable stomach from day to day. There is no power of holding any thing healing, but the whole Pharmacopeia rushes with noisome velocity through this mis- erable art. Convulsed and blue-cold, half death and half physic, it
(3)
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
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.
5. And if it is ill to death in this wise, agreeing in its several mem- bers upon no remedy, but spasmodic towards 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 part 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 than nothing.
6. That such is the fact there can be no doubt. A short consider- ation of the predisponents and chances in cholera will convince us of it. Whenever cholera is coming out, and patches of country or of city are included in its spots, whatever weakens the human organism, and lowers the tone and harmony of health, predisposes the body to its reception. Some populations 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, throw down its prey into the pits of cholera, and makes recovery nearly hopeless. Ay, and when the attack occurs, the fight for life is on the same field of natural chances. If artificial depressants in the shape of drugs are poured into the system, the opportunities of life are still further con- tracted. Especially is this the case with opium, brandy, and stimu- lants, 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 ?
7. 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, how- ever, 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 drainmaker, call in the chloride of lime maker, the butcher, baker, publican, and the rapid shell and 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.
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
5
8. 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 preven- tion, 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 call- ings, and do not await the impertinent call of any single profession. As the fire engines 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 show 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.
9. Nursed and reared in and to the medical profession, there is a rapidly growing set of dissentients called the Homosopaths, who alone offer to occupy the place which the "infallible" profession has ceded. Alive with faith born of experience, standing upon the ever- lasting and ever-living rock of facts, they know that they have medi- cal or healing powers equal to 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 house top have cried it forth with all their might to all whom it concerns ; but they have cried to stopped ears and scornful faces.
10. 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 : —
TREATED AT THEIR OWN HOUSES.
Results of Allopathic or ordinary treatment of Cholera.
Cases. Deaths.
At Tischnowitz, in Moravia. . 331 102 " Wishney, 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 New Brunswick, . 210 59
. " the troops in Canada, . . 356 127
3107 1291
About one death in every 2 l-3d cases, . more than 39 per cent.
Results of Homoeopathic treatment of Cholera.
Cages. Death*.
By Dr. Baer, at Prague, . . 80 0 " Dr. Bakody, at Raab, in
Hungary, 154 6
" Dr. Duplat, at Marseilles, 60 12 " Dr. Gerstel. at Tischnowitz,
in Moravia, 327 32
" Dr. Hanusch, at Tischnowitz, 84 6 " Dr. Kliener, at Saratof, in
Russia, 183
Dr. Jal, at Marseilles, . Dr. Lederer, at Vienna, . Dr. Lens, at Pesth. . . Dr. Lichtenfels, at Vienna, DY Lovy, at Prague, . . Dr. Marenzeller, at Vienna, Dr. Mayer, at Pesth, . . Dr. Qum. at Tischnowitz and Paris, 48
19 80 40 44 80 30 65
27 4 2 8 3 8 3 0
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
By Dr. Rummel, at Merseburg, 46 16
" Dr. Schaller, at Prague, .113 0
" Dr. Schreter, at Lemberg, 27 1
" Dr. Schultz, at Vienna, . 17 0 " Dr. Scider, at Wishney,
Wototschok, in Russia, 109 23 " Dr. Vrecka, at Vienna and
Slowitz, 144 12
" Dr. Veith, at Vienna, . . 125 3
1875 169
About one death out of 1 1 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 places and periods. In a considerable degree, however, the Homoeopathic statements are sup- ported by testimonials and acknowledgments from local authorities.]
TREATED IN HOSPITALS.
Casei. Deaths.
In the Drummond St. Cholera
Hospital, Edinburgh, . . 461 291
" the Cholera Hospital, Ber- lin, under Dr. Bohr, . . 97 64
" Krunkenburgs wards, at
Halle, 104 53
" Hamburg Hospitals, Oct.
and Nov. 1831, .... 283 178
" the Cholera Hospital, St. Petersburg, by Dr. Lich- tenstadt, 636 317
" the Hospital, Raab, . . .284 122
" the Hospital, Bourdeaux, .104 72
1969 1097
About one death in 1 4-5th cases, or about 56 per cent.
Cases. Deaths.
By Dr. Fleischmann, at Vienna, 732 244 " Drs. Haynel and Staler, at
Berlin, 32 6
" Dr. Mabit, at Bourdeaux, .31 6
795 258
About one death in 3 1-1 Oth cases, or between 32 and 33 per cent.
11. " 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 re- markable difference also in the latter, although it is to be borne in mind that patients are only brought to a hospital when they show undoubted evidence of the fully developed disease, many after having been subject to a very violent treatment, and having been dosed with Allopathic med- icines, 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 Homeopathic Dispensary, from the 4th October, 1848, to the 1st 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 cases treated at Edinburgh and Leith during the same period, is as follows : —
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 7
12. " 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 Homogopathy^ The hospital in question, it should be added, was daily visited by two Allopathic inspect- ing physicians appointed by the government. Dr. Roth, of Mulfich, also, who was sent by the Bavarian government to observe the cholera in dif- ferent localities, and report on the effects of its Homoeopathic treatment, published, in 1833, an interesting pamphlet, which has furnished a con- siderable portion of the statistics above detailed. The statistics from Tischnowitz, in Moravia, were furnished by the authorities 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 beea 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 whilst administering the consolations of religion to those infected with cholera, he was shocked at the awful mortality that prevailed ; and the idea of treating them according to the Homosopathic system, with which he was already familiar, occurred to him. His success was so great, that of 125 patients he lost but 3."
13. It would be easy to add to the above lists similar results 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 shows 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 percent. 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.
14. One would have thought that facts like these, not alas marvel- lous in themselves, yet marvellously good in contrast with the deadly zero of the doctors, would have arrested the attention, and provoked the trial, of all professors of the art of healing. One would have thought that they would have deserted their old bog of failures, and tried the dry land to which Homoeopathy invites them on every side. On the
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- daily reported to the authorities, to have been included in the General Return, — their deductions would show a proportion of deaths to cures of five to one under Allopathic treat- ment.
* This is the work of an Allopathic surgeon, the talented editor of the Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medicine.
8 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
contrary, on they go from unsurety to unsurety, experimenting in the same fruitless direction, and sedulously avoiding every path that pro- fesses to lead away 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 whooping cough cut short, were straightway pronounced to be not whooping cough, because under Homoeopathy they had not lasted six months — the proper Allopathic duration. So inflamma- tion 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 fry bleeding and mercury enough to kill. So that they have a ready way of lim- iting 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 Bourdeaux in a day of thirteen hours. He said it could not be Bour- deaux — 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 Bourdeaux 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 tell- ing him that I had gone in a travelling town drawn by a huge tea- kettle with a coal scuttle for my two horses. And now he 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 com- ing: 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 whooping 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 ?
15. 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, Tlie Times, Tlie Lancet, and
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
Athenceum: its disgraces are the occasions on which it distributes stars and garters from its seat of honor ; if the Homoeopaths come with an embassy to any of its outer gates, it proclaims in characters of crooked fists, " exterminate the barbarians, and let them be extermi- nated : away with the foreign devils." Nor does there appear to be any thing but public opinion collaring and deposing it, that will bring their great Fe Fo Fum to the knowledge conveyed by the natural senses.
16. 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 endeavored to be admitted to the presence of this big per- sonage, 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 pub- lic station, as moulding the opinions of millions, they had done their thorough duty, had given every thing 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 alleviate the dis- pensations 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 if 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 long letter upon the Fungoid Theory of chol- era appeared 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 occupa- tion, 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 brim- stone 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 to be, with regard to all moral unity — Idetermined to write to it, and ask it about Homreopathy. " 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 Homoe- opathy did not appear in print at all ! I had been led to anticipate as much. Of course many letters had been cushioned before mine. 2
10 AVAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
And then I was told, but sense and duty would not let me off the trouble of writing on that account, that The Times was dead 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.
17. 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 thousands in our cities, our villages, our fleets, and our armies ; the doctors at their wits' end, with all their resources quite broken, — of most approved badness ; the population, the med- ical profession, and the journals, rushing about in panic terror for something, any thing, to stay the mischief; some looking into the air with microscopes after floating fungi and imps to be peppered, and have Times sulphur put upon their tails; some with wild uplifted faces imploring Hercules Chadvvick to wash, flush, drain, and fume away the destroyer ; some convulsively grasping at castor oil, and with angry convulsiveness throwing it 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 be somewhat of a sheet anchor, that has been proved to be such in all lands under these fearful inflictions. Let us try all things in heaven and earth, and in the waters under the earth, all things in sulphur and the pit of Orcus also — all things but Homoeopathy. This is just the case with every sinful state. The sinner is perfectly ready to cede every thing but his own fortress, his own nonsense, his own sin. The drunkard 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. " Any thing you please, gentlemen," saith The Times, " but such truths. Away with them, away with Homoeopathy."
18. Pretexts of course are easily raised to show how right and proper it is to blink the convincing facts in favor of Homoeopathy, and to decide against it because it is at first sight improbable. They say that the 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 worse of their existing malady. Must is a mighty fellow, but often easily "crumpled up" by unceremonious practice. Experi- ence 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 allegation of the impos- sibility of Homoeopathy is then in every physical sense a kind of madness, and may be dismissed as such. And now let us attend to
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 11
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 cholera : 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 formi- dably great, consisting of huge stores of drugs, many of them produ- cing instant effects of poison and death, unmistakable signs of a certain power, loses professedly, as to-day's Times states, (October 4th,) 65 out of 100 cholera cases. If this treatment, bulky and po- tential, be not inadequate, what is ? I have already shown 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 pro- portion. Here the inadequacy is far less. Let me recall to you that power and violence are different things, but that violence and weak- ness are, for gbod 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 less a powerful medicine. Moreover the dimensions of power are not weighed by scales, or told off on grad- uated 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 medical shops : great cures deter- mine the only greatness which sick men, or their guardians, can rec- ognize in medicine. I dismiss this, of inadequacy, as being but a reflection of the confusion of those with whom inadequacy is the everlasting luck.
19. A third count in the medical brief against Homceopathy re- mains to be noticed ; the allegation that its known success is due to Nature, and that it might pYofitably go even farther, and instead of giving infinitesimals give clean nothing. It is remarkable that all these charges are true of the accuser — true of the old system of med- icine. It would be better that it should do nothing than fill the human constitution with poisons. But its recommendation to Na- ture is, to say the least, very suspicious. Like some doubtful char- acter 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 inquire 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 natures ; and this Guy they have leeched, blistered, bled and calomel- ized in a manner that showed at once that they thought they were
12 WAR, CHOLERA, AND TIIK MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
playing with a bowelless costume : but this is the very nearest they have come to nature so far as my knowledge goes. The Dame her- self has ordered them from her sight, from the beginning. Eyes, ears, nose, mouth, — all her lofty and all her lowly features, each fibre of her self-sustaining and universal frame, abhors, repudiates and out- spews their druggeries and violations, and names them swindlers when they claim her friendship. Yet, perhaps, by her they mean somebody else!
20. I fell on this saving thought in reading in a book by Mr. Trench, on the significance of words. He finds that words gradually change their meaning according to the moral state of the users. Now, thought I, cpvw 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 met- aphor 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.
21. For nobody can mean that in doing vulgar nothing they are near nature, who, furnished forth by her Maker, does nearly every thing that is done. Were the perfection of medicine to lie in doing nothing, it would be out of the sisterhood of the arts, whose busy 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 con- clusion, and as it were shave nothing very closely. There is the expectant school : the people who wait to see what will turn up in disease ; who note agonies and sketch them, and see when they get better, and when they grow worse : fine students of the natural laws, ascertaining for philosophical transactions the natural duration of fever, whooping cough, and pneumonia ; just as expectant agricul- turists, sometimes called savages, watch bogs and morasses to see how long they will last in the course of things, and when heaven will drain them, and sow them for waving sheets of corn. These doctors belong to a tract of physic recently mapped down : they are in a state of nature, and may be called the aborigines of disease. I believe they will easily move off farther west, as they have no hold on thS soil : like the Choctaws and the Chippewas 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
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 13
nursing on account of the very defect, or annulment, of the medical or higher art. So that our expectants or 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 chron- icled, when we noticed that public health had come entirely to be a question of draining, and other non-medical preventive means.
22. You all of you remember the story of the lawyer who con- ducted 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 tis- sue. 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, whicli 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 Homosopathy 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 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 rny 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 Homospathic 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 downfall 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 ap- proaching 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. 'Tis 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
14 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
lands of hope. This imagination, by the wonderful connection of the mind with the body, is not only the prophet, but in part the real- ization, 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 hav- ing it, they only show that they themselves are out of the circle of live arts and sciences, and active citizens altogether.
23. I will also go further in admission, because I love to give way to our foes ; and now I grant that the impalpable doses lend them- selves to imagination better than grosser quantities. I can't help it, — 'tis an undoubted law of nature. If you can see too much, the mind has less suggestion room. I note a few perfectly sweet glob- ules labelled aconite, and having had 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 confectionary 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 not 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 it : as though one's chare-goody should reproach one's Dulcinea with her magic, her beauty, and her sweetness.
24. Well, but there is another quite different accusation 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 dangerous druggists. I am afraid this is not honest. For the most part we use the same substances as our Allopaths, though on a different principle, and in different doses. Arsenic, mercury, prussic acid, mix vomica, 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 bri'ng forward one substance in nature which will produce any poisonous effects given by the mouth in ten thousandths of a grain ; which are about our largest 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 mag- nesia are equally innoxious in our way of appliance: the lion lies down with the lamb in the new city of health. This accusation, however, I opine, is meant for patients, not for medical ears : they 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 Ham, while he told the poor susceptible wife, that if ever she placed herself under it, the drugs would destroy her brain entirely. I would not judge him harshly : but 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.
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 15
25. Before quitting this interesting thesis, the imagination, 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 imagi- native and fanciful classes. The former are no doubt liable to per- manent impressions which may run on into fixed ideas that set medi- cinal 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 com- mand 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 vigor, and the real malady comes on the scene in its physical predom- inance. In this case such patients are as readily treated and cured as other persons. I experience this every day, and note in it a con- vincing 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, aud 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.
26. 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 treat- ment, when they put forth that morbid mind affords facilities to any method of cure.
27. 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 with me. In chronic cases, coffee and spices and green tea are nearly all I inter- dict : otherwise 1 believe chiefly in variety, and allo\v temperance the run of the kitchen and the cellar. In acute cases, fevers and inflam- mations, the patient's instincts generally diet him sufficiently; he tongs for water and diluents ; and these are allowed by every body. In diet then there is very little difference between us and the old prac- titioners ; and the corollary is that our superior success is due solely to the superiority of the Homoeopathic medicines.
28. 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 cheer-
16 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
fully 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 ap- plause from an ever-widening public, that edifies and excites us to continual'exertion of thought and study in the delightful path of the healing profession.
29. 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 pro- fession in active means, it would already have vast merits. We all know how current the notion has become, that the doctors are scep- tics 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 ad- vanced 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 destroying that which is meant to pass away. But in the mean time 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 Coun- trymen, that before I knew Homoeopathy I was in daily moral perplex- ity at the bedside ; experience had taught me that in many cases I was of more than doubtful benefit : my honesty, without being struck down, was troubled in very conscience at the means I employed, and which (though justified by secundum artem, and statistics of secundum necem) 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 at- tendants, 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-remem- bered occasion. Oftentimes I would gladly not have been called in under such circumstances ; for though I was not fully conscious of the fact, I now know, alive as I am and renewed by faith in Homoe- opathy, that 1 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 counter cheers 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 introduced no
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 17
unseemliness, and for the rest I feel that I am 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 lands from the domain of the now incurable, and plant the fences of health and vigor in a realm of constitutions which lie as yet beyond my feeble powers.
30. Each man, Sir, and my Countrymen, as he writes his 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 life with which he is surrounded. Let them then say now, that it is the above living faith in medicine, corne down to us re- newed by Homosopathy, that makes its small resolved band not only courageous at the bedside, but full of joy in the presence of the vast extended lines of the medical foe : servants of a truth 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 solid-looking squares of infantry of Apoth- ecaries 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.
31. 1 must still further notice to you another dodge of those who dream against Homoeopathy ; the common saw, that it is all very well in chronic diseases, but inapplicable to emergencies and acute cases. The first 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 the soil of a bad or broken- down constitution. Where the latter is the case, Homoeopathy too will do more than any thing else. My assertion is borne out by hun- dreds of practitioners in all parts of these islands, of the British pos- sessions, and of the civilized world ; from the Himalayas to New Orleans, cholera and yellow fever and other kindred fiends, cower, crouch, and run away before the Homoeopathic rifles : the experience 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 stereotyped smiles, mes- merism and the rest : and these practitioners have an abundant clientry, who are not used to run away from them to the violent inefficacious people, whenever disease is sharp and sudden. More- over, 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 Homo3opathy ; 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 evidence then is a sufficient reply
o
18 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
to the unbased thought, that Homoeopathy cannot tackle acute diseases.
32. 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 tvvistiness 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 mo- mentary 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 prob- ability 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.
33. Here let me say a word about the only way of investigating Homoeopathy. If you merely wish to know what the facts of th6 case are, you must receive them from those who have elicited them, and whose testimony, world-wide, is unopposed. You cannot gain- say them : you might as well deny the statistics of the Board of Health, or the tables of meteorological observations. This is how- ever but a passive reception, though affirmative of necessity, such as you give to 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 farther, see practice by others, then 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 fairly treated, or seen treated? Every success- ful aim with a drug lightens it up from the great sun of facts, and engraves its angel property of relief on your soul forever : that piece of knowledge is so active to you that scepticism will never come near it. One such good deed with one of these natural substances God has given us, is like a virtue to a place ; its transaction makes hallowed ground, and creates human or historic 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 in this way, then for the first time it defends itself in our minds. So our point is that skilful practice is the king of belief, and that he who has not attained to that has not investigated Homoeopathy. In all this, Homoeopathy is precisely on a par with every other business. Of course we have here left entirely on one side those who will not submit to
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 19
this ordeal: they are in very fact those who have some other calling 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.
34. But failing utterly to show that Homoeopathy is either impos- sible, 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. I am fond of making a proper admission on this head. It is indeed true and after- wards likely that the men who can study and apply the exquisite sys- tem 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 shoeblack, and a clum- sy 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 lower to the higher station is likely to be accompanied with some excellent incompetency of the kind.
35. They say too that the Homoeopaths have added nothing to medical science: by which science they mean their own jogtrot. Posterity however will not be slow to acknowledge that Hahnemann has created therapeutical medicine, by furnishing it with a central lawr round which the healing facts and instances of ages, revolve ; which has a new breadth of inductive basis like the other new pro- gressive sciences ; and a coextensive 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 al- ready 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 di- rectly 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 :
20 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
nothing more unitedly creditable to the heart and head of a great discoverer, than this principle announced by the lips 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 a con- crete and practical as well as an exact science — this science of the correspondence of therapeutics with practical healing.
36. Perhaps however without an example you are hardly aware of what I mean by this principle and this correspondence. Let me then illustrate. Ipecacuanha is a drug familiarly known to cause vomit- ing ; and in Hahnemann's proving a number of other affections. Now then here, in this substance, we have a prime remedy for vomiting when it occurs as any part of the train of symptoms which belong to Ipecacuanha. Yet another instance. Tobacco (tabacum) produces depression and -deadly faintness on those unused to it; and there is, to my knowledge, no more likely remedy for those states, often cur- ing them at once, and preventing their recurrence, than this very ta- bacum. 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 other- wise it would directly increase the disease, going specifically as it does to the very atoms of the diseased part. 2. Because in the in- finitesimal 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.
37. We see therefore in thus giving the symptoms produced by drugs, that we are collecting the precise means of extinguishing dis- eases ; and by the proving of each new drug we may hope to be able to do acts of cure which were impossible before. In this way may we not expect that the whole field of disease which has any real anal- ogy 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 pre- vented from producing lasting derangements in the body. Mental diseases belong to a different department, but they too are in a de- gree prevented from waxing when their natural feet are taken away in the removal of their bodily correspondents.
38. 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 at- tacking disease with a charmed new medicine and alkahest distilled out of that dragon's blood, is an affair that builds the very bones and
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 21
flesh of the race, prepares new generations of health with successive births, and is properly the foundation, plasma and recipient of all other benefits of art and science, and of all benefactions of God.
39. But besides that Homoeopathy has created Materia Medica, you will also find that it has placed symptomatology, or the doctrine of symptoms, upon an entirely new basis, from which important results will follow. In the old system, medicine has gathered up all her knowledge under a few general heads of classification. These are no doubt useful and convenient, as the medical man's account of disease. But then they 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 it to enable them to glean what they consider to be the matter according to their classification, but a good part 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 this, because it wants precise symptoms to correspond with the precision it has at- tained in the effects of drugs upon the system ; and these symptoms it takes from the reliable lips of the patient himself. Accordingly it alone embraces the true and particular chronicles of disease. In con- sequence, 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 lungs, in which you no longer keep at a distance from the patient's chest, and guess the condition within, but you put your ear, 'and hear the state of the breathing and the rhythm of the beating. So in Homoeopathy, you take the pa- tient'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 corre- spondence 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 fore- head, 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 hu- mane method of setting some store by the patient's own account of his feelings.
40. But what Hahnemann has done will appear more clearly from the sequel, when I direct your attention to the functions of a Board of Health, which are now for the first time clear and feasible from his life and actions. At present I will only remark that his shining wake is occupied by active successors, who not content with their daily rounds of healthgiving, 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 la- chesis, cobra, podophyllum, and many others, known nothing of by the orthodox profession, and yet most indispensable in some of the worst maladies at the bed of sickness. I mention this to show that in Homoeopathy, we have a progressive science and a progressive art.
22 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
This is not the case with old physic. A progressive science is one which, on the foundation of to-day, builds the basement of to-mor- row, 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 Sun- day : 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, Homoe- opathy is older than what calls itself orthodoxy, which dates its con- stant year 1, from the last new discoveries of chemistry. Homoeop- athy, on the other hand, holds what it has, and by the constant liv- ing 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.
41. Sir, and my Countrymen, I have troubled you with something very like a squabble, and bandied words with old physic in your offi- cial 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 in- terfered with the ediles and the street sweepers, he comes with the loudest double raps at the door of Parliament, to request that his va- cant chair may be kept vacant and still called his ; and that all un- qualified 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 hauled 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 prac- tice " means, if any thing, practice according to certain rules previously laid down, but where, O ! ye sharpest sighted, arc the rules in the old practice of medicine? I know of no rules approximating to any thing 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 sev- enty out of the hundred is by the aggravating fact of thirty-live citi- zens saved, an irregular practitioner. Be it enacted that two hun- dred 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 vio- lated ; and some Homceopathist will have to bear the brunt of hav- ing 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 in- vention cannot be more deadly than the orthodox rules. No quack.
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 23
even if he came at the head of a battalion, each man carrying a re- volver, and declared 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.
42. Nothing can be gained by putting down what you please to call quacks. There are many men and women, who from circum- stances cannot obtain a diploma, but who have a medical eye in their heads worth a thousand times the sigillum maximum of the best col- lege upon earth. A Preissnitz is an example that shines with its own unborrowed light, and shows that nature is the fountain of every pro- fession, and raises sons to enlarge and supersede it when it grows old and stiff'. If these men, too, are limited, and kill 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 ped- antry, and sink occasionally into the false estate o.f rules and ruts : but where their instincts and their humanity are awake and active, they are safe and healing. Their murders by pedantry, though lam- entable, are as nothing to those which take place on the old plan.
43. What I should propose to Parliament, instead of this attempt to put down " quacks," 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 pleases 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 to add S.D., or Self-Dubbed ; or N.M.D.C.R. 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 brass plates 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 regis- tration 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.
44. 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 nowadays, honesty and competency have so far gained a standing, that they will take care of
24 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
themselves without the props of Government patronage ; and the di- ploma of a good medical college, certifying to a sound education, .will have all the force that is desirable without being armed with the terrors of the magistracy. The fear rather is, that respectability of it- self should overbear all other more native gifts ; and this will continue to be the case long after medicine has entered the splendid path of free trade. On the other hand, by opening the gates of medicine, you will allow new medical education to arise, and by competing with the old, to exact a greater perfection, and a great strictness in all departments. Thereafter we shall have real medical enterprise ; and this kind of central and lifegiving energy is the only thing that ought to be protected by the State. The protection consists in the maintenance of entire liberty.
45. 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 Ho- moeopaths 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 nov- elty 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 blooming alone; tearful roses of the desert ; for too late they might find out that though extreme degrees of 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 Lance^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 work- house lies.
46. 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 forever. 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. Mean- time, 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 have 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
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 25
and a pair of official beadle's breeches with nobody in them,) called Regular Practice?
47. 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 connection of medicine with the State like the connection 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 Fidei, necnon et Pharmacopoeia Londinensis ! The very penny pieces would blush in their brazen faces to find her sacred im- age 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 Country- men, so weak, or indeed so mad, every other calling in the empire would, on principle, exact a similar connection. 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 Canterbury contu- maciously 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 abetters 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 cit- izen abhors. Heaven and Lord Palmerston defend us from so dread a crisis !
48. 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 wherev- er 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 doc- trines, or to cotton, or breadstuffs, there is neither contrast nor comparison, nor consequently emulation, but a single unvarying method of production, and a single result. Society, made up of di- verse 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 be- come so trite now, and in the most material sphere, that I must apol- ogize 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.
4
26 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OP HEALTH.
49. It has been too often thought that institutions create the handi- crafts and mindcrafts that flourish under their sway, and, as I think, often in spite of them. The fact appears to be, that in every great nation there are successive drifts in its mind and 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 drifts 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 human instincts a thousand times more pressing and forcible than any animal instincts. No na- tion has them burning in the deep kilns of its subterrene, more pow- erfully than Britain, and hence the quantity of proverbial wisdom directly aiming to remove impediments 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 hinderance, is the single point to be attained : and this is best done by Government assuming as its grand end, individual freedom, and using its force to prevent all ex- ternal pressure, (especially of bodies and corporations,) upon the mind, thought, invention, and originality of the private man. We may rely upon it, that at any given moment, the quantity of the la- tent instinct brought to bear, is small compared with that which is smothered by the circumpressure of old habits, guilds and conven- tionalities; 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 phy- sic, just take off the iron shoes with which the apothecaries have shod infant medicine, the tight garters with which the surgeons have tourniquetted its legs; the crushing stays with which the stately phy- sicians 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.
50. It is manifest too, that the quantity of healing in a commu- nity suffers by all privileges given to one set of professors. For medicine is not one only, but a body and congeries — an organism of arts; and if you endow those whose bent calls them to a single branch, you thereby discourage and probably alienate numerous oth- er cultivators whose genius incites them to other departments. In this way, while a profession seems to be full, it may really be over- stocked with one kind of practitioners who are comparatively little wanted, and offer no supply of other descriptions, for which there is the, greatest exigency. And this takes place because you will not
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 27
leave Nature's and Providence's work to them, but undertake it with- out the means of fulfilling it. Such is exactly the case with medi- cine at present. Drugs and dosers there are in abundance, and straightway the cry is, that the science and art of healing are over- stocked ; 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 undoubt- edly 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.
51. 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. I do 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 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 mercurials — 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 did school, in their own horror of drugging and its effects ; and a public, so tempered, will, it may easily be foreseen, /resent the frequent cases of physical ruin from drugs and bleedings |occurring among its valued members. Many new legal questions | will thus doubtless arise: as this for instance : whether a man is not [ entitled to compensation for having lost a week's work, or a year's I work, from a black draught, or a hundred such, administered to the [ patient's injury : it being proved by parallel Homoeopathic cases, that the whole of this treatment could have been done without, with benefit to the man's health, and insuring his speedy recovery. 2. Whether a case of bleeding, similarly proved to be no part of the art of healing, will not be liable to heavy costs from the doctor who has shed blood under professional pretences. For, mark you, there is now an art in the world which has disallowed bleeding. What the damage for a child's teeth rotted out of its head by calomel treat- ment, when Homoeopathy would have cured the sickness without, and left the teeth standing ? What the damages for a little boy ruptured in nature's violent struggle to regurgitate the nauseous mixture which Homoeopathy would have had no call to give him,
28 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
and which left him worse than it found him, pins a Hernia for the surgeon to take care of? I 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 mur- derous old practice of medicine. Parliament ought to be prepared for these cases, of which no doubt it will have warning in the per- plexities 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 poi- sons. 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 mat- ters profitably, and can make no good use of them, but may do terri- ble 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 hundred fold greater than that of a man who buys rat's 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.
52. 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 modifying the institutions that have grown up under the despotism of the colleges. It is well known what a prejudice there is in the poorer classes against our hospitals. This is due 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 affect- ed by surgery, however, the case is different ; and assuredly numerous operations are annually performed by adroit s'urgeons 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 Homo3opathic 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 Ailopathist ought to do, is to commit a patient for operation ; the
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 29
Homosopathist alone should sentence him to undergo it. Hence the public necessity, in the interest of the poor, of superadding, by au- thority of Parliament, a coequal Homo3Opathic staff to each and all of our great hospitals and infirmaries. And this could only be done fairly by giving up a proportion of beds to the Homreopaths, who would then enter upon their judicial functions in full medical robes. I have long felt that a board of sanction is necessary to allow or dis- allow all and singular operations on the human frame ; and to pre- vent 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 be lopped without the least expostulation from the patient. Now then is the time for Parliament, led on by Mr. Brady, to interfere. The Home- opaths may do the old profession a kind service here ; and I am sure that even Mr. Wakley will not be sorry to shift some part of the re- sponsibility of great operations on to their shoulders. Should it unfortunately happen that the medical officers of any existing hos- pital are contumacious, and repudiate their new colleagues, Parlia- ment can provide for the case, accept their resignation, and decree that the whole staff may be occupied by the Homoeopathic corps.
53. 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 like ; for in fact accidents in their treat- ment 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 vulnerary remedies, i. e., medicaments that have a direct power 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 com- mon marigold, does the like Christian office for deep wounds in which much flesh is lost; promoting their filling up, and obviating the extent of scars : and that symphytum, (the common great comfrey,) is as uniting for broken bones, as the others for other lesions.* The series goes far beyond this ; so far, that in all scientific probability, every organ and part of us has surgeon herbs corresponding to it, and which repair its mischances. No range of facts in the world is better authenticated than the curative powers that these substances exert upon the effects of accidents: in common with hundreds of my Homoeopathic brethren I see those powers in benignant action every day. Now what are we to think of the fact, that the London hospi- tals ignore all these things, and have nothing to put in their places :
* Solomon's seal, the common daisy, all the stonecrops, eyebright, tamus com- munis, and hundreds of other herbs are wound herbs ; known as such to the rustics, but unknown to the medical profession.
30 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
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 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 re- covery, 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 su ill-rings not unlike those caused by mechanical injuries; and hence, if exhibited in large doses, (as was, I understand, the case in the pro- fessed 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 Homoeo- pathic staff is appointed to them, to oversee and correct at least that part of their practice.
55. I look forward with great interest to the Parliamentary action, led on by Mr. Brady, on this important question. The thing is so manifestly humane, that 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 life in many delightful cases; while moreover as a body, they will be converted to the hospitals, think of them kindly when they are well ; toast them with grateful recollec- tions, 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.
56. On a single other ground also, and one of the most considerate kind, I would base my advocacy of the introduction of a Homoeo- pathic 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 Hoimropathy. 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
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 31
officers by showing them the practice most in demand. If Allopathy went to the wall in this way, they could not say it was any thing but 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 circum- stances : 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 bedridden 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 re- mote from each other; and the benefit of comparison and contrast is lost. Shall not science be entitled (by Parliament, led on by Mr. Brady) to receive the edifying spark of their collision ?
57. I would give the world myself to be present in the waiting room for out patients, after the two classes of patients are duly re- ceived together : to see the 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 mother 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 im- portant scene, which will assuredly take place one day in our grave infirmaries ; though whenever that day dawns, the laughter cure will show how various nature is in her possibilities of restoration.
58. Now, Sir, and my Countrymen, a good general takes into ac- count the hinderances and difficulties which 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 fore- casting, has reserves of courage stationed firm in his heart against disappointments ; and in 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
32 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
have the powerful assistance of Parliament led on by Mr. Brady, I would humbly propose another strategy, should the Allopathic for- tress 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 inquire into the effects of drugs and the drugging si/stem, 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 inter- ested 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 squab- bles. A material part of the inquiry 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 hospi- tals 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 mean time it is clear, as they wish to learn the effects of drugging on the sick, and as the allopathic doctors, though sick enough, are pro- verbial for not taking their* own medicines, that it will not be neces- sary 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 and are after the drugs.
59. Probably the masters of great factories might be useful wit- nesses to call among the first : I mean, some of those humane chiefs of industry, who make it their business to observe the condition of their workmen ; and who are so well respected, that if they were to issue 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 many children had died under assiduous treatment; whether calomel and blistering had been largely or long employed in each case ; how many leechings or bleedings had preceded dissolution ; and whether the treatment had been satisfactory to the parents or not: also whether in their notion physicking was any cause of poverty, by wearing out the mothers, and weakening the right arms of the laboring population. They might also ascertain whether in a hundred cases, any proportion of the patients fell into bad habits of which 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 after- wards, and laid the foundation for opium eating or laudanum drink-
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 33
ing : 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 inquire whether the habit of poisoning, which has appeared as a horrid nightshade in some of our rural districts, had been sown un- wittingly in bad minds by the propagation of the drugging system. Benefit societies and clubs might usefully furnish some facts, partic- ularly 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 ham- lets, where doctors are few ; and above all, of any remote oases where there are none at all: details respecting the longevity of the popula- tion 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 in- stances 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 inquiry ; but the putting of the questions would cause a great deal of medical thought, and true sanitary spirit in the population ; and if it did probe painful spots, and sometimes renew agonies of vain regret, and bitter feelings, it would still be wholesome for future, and above all, for Parliamentary guidance. And for these reasons I do not see how such a commission can properly fail to have the powerful advocacy of Mr. Brady.
60. Should Mr. Brady be chairman of the committee, I would hint into his most, private ear, that he may gain some credit, and elicit facts, by calling to the table edge some of the dentists in large practice in the metropolis, or in Dublin. Let him ask them to prepare for him a statement of what they know by experience about the effects of med- ical treatment upon the teeth, and hence upon the powers of masti- cation-and digestion ; whether the drug system stands in any denned relation to caries ; and whether, upon the whole, they regard Allo- pathy 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 offices, to ask them whether any preference exists for taking the policies of Allopathic over Homoeopathic patients ; or which way the matter runs. It is obvious that the questions are somewhat new, and could hardly be answered offhand ; but notice might be given ; printed lists of queries sent round, and even inserted by public advertisement in the journals; and in a little time, facts would begin to arrange themselves round each query, and a well- stored body of witnesses would come down to Westminster to Mr Brady.
61. It will be better to manage the matter thus quietly, at a green-
o
34 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
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 inevita- ble shorthand, 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 rea- sons I should deprecate a direct appeal to the feelings of my Country- men on the bleeding and drugging system. Only suppose a Homoeo- pathic 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 danger- ous fellows evoke, what pangs might they not parade, what real Stygian shadows might they not cause td 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 Cob- den, 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 ter- ror. Then the fiery Homoeopathic Bright would fulmine, and he also would announce on sitting down, that he had the satisfaction of intro- ducing another patient : when straightway a throatless grave bird with swelled 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 the patients for such a purpose would be a great inexpediency: flocking to a hospital, and shut in mass in its receiving rooms, they are all going to secundem 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 to town, placarding, exciting, pathogogizing, printing tracts, collecting sub- scriptions, publishing the Anti-drug- League, with the Anti-bleeding- Supplement: rearing a formidable head in the Legislature itself, and finally causing some Allopathic prime minister to apostatixe during the next invasion of cholera, and overthrow terra finna 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 a Blue Book, but to collect evidence in a still room of the long corridor, and then proceed to shut up Allopathy by direct and clinching legislation.
62. As was the case with the Anti-Slavery Bill, it will be an im- portant 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 forestalKthe wisdom of Parliament. Yet I in- cline for many reasons to suspect that the advocates of immediacy will have the best of it. A principal ground is, that after the com- mittee has concluded its labors, Allopathy, from what has been
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 35
proved of it, will be so thoroughly suspect, that every death which takes place under it must necessarily become the subject of an in- quest. 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, ex- cept Sundays, Forty Coroners and nearly five hundred coroners' jury- men, besides several hundred chemists and pathologists, and barristers innumerable. Mr. Wakley will be able to inform Parliament how in- convenient 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 im- mediate abolitionists will say, by direct and merciful action, to pre- vent this unseemly overhauling of the allopathic Morgue ; which yet must take place if any respite of years, or even weeks, be injudi- ciously granted to the condemned system.
63. 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 in- quiry 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 Jet them hear the condition of health in those homes. Let them ask the parents whether the series of their "children's diseases" has in- deed 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 liocks 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 com- bating constitutional predispositions; but after the first indispensable assiduity of attendance is past, the medical expenses of the family become as a general rule 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
3G WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
system, the doctor's bill in unhealthy families does not generally in- crease 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 citixens saved, and funeral expenses saved, be, or be not, a financial consideration of great im- portance in the State ? Mr. Cobden, whom I hereby put upon the com- mittee to intensify the arithmetic of Mr. Brady, will do good service in extracting the marrow of this kind of questions.
01. 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 sum- moned 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 in- evitable distresses of the sick room ; is its service dirty and disgusting to perform ? Are blisters on children sad things to dress in the ab- sence of the doctor? Is leeching a hard office, and are leech bites apt to bleed too much, and to overdo the blood cure? Is the administra- tion 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 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 com- mittee ? Are women, after their hour of sorrow, relieved of the con- sequences 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 ? Are the quantity and quality of the mother's milk better when she is not drugged ; and have they any facts to give in their rough way, of the difference in the state of mother and child under the two systems? I think Mr. Brady will find the evidence of experienced and respectable nurses of great importance.
Go. The fact is, that nurses have a great many things put upon them, which either ought, to be undone or the doctors ought to do them for themselves. Many a medicine given to children is so chok- ingly horrible that a medical practitioner ought to be present to count the pulse and to watch the countenance during its administration ; just as is properly the case at a military 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 ex- periences. Our eldest child, a baby then, was attacked in the night with a sudden bronchitis, attended with great wheexing and oppres- sion. My wife, and I sat on end in bed in sanitary conjugal quorum. I ordered ipecacuanha wine as an emetic, and 1 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
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 37
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 indig- nant 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 ; 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 prac- tice, and that this very occasion was sent, partly to oblige me to look into that new thing called Homoeopathy. The upshot of the parti- cular 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 homoeopathic remedy it was ; after which, the oppression of the breath- ing passed away. The circumstance made an impression on my mind, and I now record it, being sure as day, that humble and sim- ple 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 contem- plation of so good a riddance.
66. 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 atfected 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 Homosopathy gains its chief triumphs by the extinction of the disease within the frame. Of course, therefore, the allopathic method spreads all the loathsome- ness of maladies under the very senses. And then, moreover, mark the difficulty of attending to the artificially created wants of nature in confined spaces. Supposing that measles break 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 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 forty fold in the narrow stifly berths of a ship, where at best, simply misery is triumphant ?
38 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
"What a different picture, Sir, and my Countrymen ! is the homcec* pathic treatment of this same complaint! Pnt 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 eases where there is fever: put twenty drops of tincture of pulsatilla, third dilution, similarly tasteless, into a tumbler of \valer. 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 bryonia — similarly tasteless, in alternation or suc- cession : 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 emi- grant ships as of public moment, I put this also to the labors of the committee, as a matter well deserving their most earnest and Chris- tian 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 sim- ple diseases. And above all, I advise them to make constant inqui- ries about the chartering of homoeopathic ships, which, as many of the merchant princes of London are in the homeopathic ranks already, is a measure which, with a little setting on foot, may be easily ac- complished.
67. 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 dm clos- eted with you in an especial sense. For the present I leave Parlia- ment 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 inde- pendent functions. If you will do what I dictate, by yourselves, you shall have all the credit of it ; for I guaranty that I will tell nobody out of your private circle that I have been the instigator. Sint sua prcemia laudi.
68. 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 towns, which washing, scrubbing, dusting, and putting refuse away, is to a private house. The old medical profession has, it is true, hoaxed you, after having hoaxed Parliament and Mr. Bra- dy, into the belief that »you are a great medical oflicer, 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 themselves at once into the enforcing of public cleanliness. You will understand me better as I proceed ; but in the mean time let me say, that I honor you extremely in your office, which I believe to be indispensable, and the creation of it a master proof that civilization is advancing.
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 39
69. But, Sir Benjamin, while your board is to the grand edifice of material England what the mistress arid 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 explor- ing the kitchen, or supervising the dusthole, which he expects to form part of the daily work of the occupants ; though if any thing pecu- liarly offensive strikes him, he will of course point it out to those whose business it was to have seen to it without his criticism. But what he does is, to medicate and diet his cases, certain distinct afflic- tions 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 to cure the existing maladies. Now just in the same way, that compound doctor, the Board of Health, has to take measures for the collective sickness ; although any side suggestions he may have to make to your Board of Cleanliness, will of course be thankfully received; even if they somewhat reprove you for not having mastered your own duties quite. "Dear me, ma'am, there's a dreadful smell of cabbage water here!" would be a pretty blow from a medical attendant to an English housewife who had a sick child in bed in the room : and " Sir Benjamin, the drains of Westminster are foul!" would no doubt grate upon you from the Board of Health. This would be precisely because it would be your business that was thus recalled to you by a foreign council.
70. The first business of a Board of Health, Sir Benjamin, in 1854, or in any other year you please, lies in issuing specific direc- tions 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 stomach aches. 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 administra- tions of domestic preventions and remedies. It is obviously vthe public doctor also, for medicine and maternity are seen to be one, transfigured both on that high mount of charity and use.
71. 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 farthest 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 in- cessant, to publish in all convenient channels, first, the mode of pre- vention 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 medi- cal men themselves, who will then for the first time become 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
40 WAR, CHOLF.KA, AM) THK MIMSTRY OF HEALTH.
a medical education of the greatest use i<> the community, sharpen- ing 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 judge. It will then be a real distinction to be a suc- cessful 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 Jaudati a laudatis.
72. This however is an oblique result, although we may 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 humlred mouth- pieces, of the necessities of drainage, sewerage, omnipresent waj:er 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 pigsties; 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 criti- cizing ditches, mantled ponds and swampy lowlands ; 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 force 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 pro- fession 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 any body else : they are all wrapped up in long Greek cloaks of technicalities, with black Latin dominoes and visors of prescriptions: it is difficult to judge of them except by kill or cure,
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 41
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.
73. I know they are timid of this, and their eyes but little accus- tomed to the public sun : moreover they are sadly, I will not say basely afraid of losing much practice if they are only called in to diffi- cult cases, when well skilled mothers find themselves at fault. I never could 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 disease any where abridged, makes all men richer in that locality. Changes from a great demand for an article, to a small, take place gradually ; there is always warning enough for the wise : and the result is 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. I do 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 (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 bv fathers and mothers in every house. There is something pusillan-
*• *• OP
imous in the wail I often hear from the medical practitioners: "O 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 ill-served and languid wretch yourself, and may well envy any English gentleman who eats, drinks, works, walks and sleeps in the humblest self-dependence.
74. 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 ex- emplifying the case; because, though medicine lies* buried in thick night, war and pestilence lend ghastly torches, to display the want of
6
42 AVAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
public succor, by lifting up for a fold or two, the darkness which shrouds the field of mortality and pain.
7-"). 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 exposed to a drenching rain from sunset to sunrise. The consequence, as T/ir Tinit'a 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 to each man of the force: TAKE i:in s roxrco- DEXDRON. This is because r/ius has a specific effect in preventing the injurious consequences that come from thorough wettings. I am not now speaking of a notion, but of a matter as well known to us Ho- mrcopathists as the existence of the Bank of England. Rhns does exert such a power. And I tell you that it is a shameful want, of humanity, and of State Economy, not to adopt so simple a means of insuring some little immunity to the brave men who go out. of this 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 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 niijht 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 retrfedies 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 percentage of lives; and so inoffensive, that in no case will they enfeeble those who use them. I say, Sir, now, that Homeop- athy 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 tne 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.
76. Your medical colleagues will try to laugh me off, and tell you they did not know of r/tns in such a connection. Believe them there: they know of no single feasible way of issuing one instruction bear-
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 43
ing 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 any thing 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 suc,h unhappy obstinacy ; and if the visitant who comes to you in humble guise for the little bread and salt of your best entertainment, happens to be an angel in rags, you have all the guilt of shutting out the angel, though in that moment of your blind- ness you only saw the rags. " He," Sir Benjamin, "who has done it unto the least of these little ones, has done it unto ME." The Law of England is at you here, as much as the Gospel of Christ. If a man in a drunken fit, kills another, the drunkenness is no plea of ex- tenuation. Nor when you and your medical circle committed your first 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 acting like reasonable beings: you knew that you were condemning before hearing, and it is no excuse that you did not know what vou were condemning. But I will tell you that the angel
•/
against which you slammed your door, had in his open hand, as a present to you from the God of art and science, the health of millions of millions.
77. 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, 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 hum- ble 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, re- peating a continual lesson of public shame, and incapable of instruc- tion 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 unbeliev- ing hearts ?
78. 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 ; a"^ain 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 1 hear nothing which appears to ema-
44 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
rate from the medical stall. Busy sailors, rough as boars in guise, but making their corny, tarry hands like lambs' fleeces for the nonce, arc doing all that penile women can do to remove the maimed creatures to their ships: and assiduous surgeons are in the rear, ex- tracting ."Minie balls, and lopping limbs: but, again, in the name of heaven, who minds us all, \vhat general orders has the medical stall' ive to meet so general and foreseen a disaster of wounds ? " O, 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 the strife of the human race, and that broken li-.-ads, and pierced bodies, and shattered limbs would be as regular a part of man's history as any other diseases, has sown upon His thousand mountains, a yellow-flowered plant called armed, which is by Him commissioned with properties, to heal the wounds inflicted in battle, and to stay many of the sad e fleets of violence upon the life of His quarrelsome children. And had there existed one gentle Bishop of Health in the British Government, eaeh man of that noble arrny would have had this arnica in his knapsack, included in the little case I mentioned before; or perhaps put sttll 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 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.
79. But, perhaps, you will tell me that I have torn you to the Cri- mea somewhat rudely ; that you had no 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
* Mr. Headland informs me that when the army was starting for the East, he made an offer through a hi<rh personage, to the Government, to furnish, at his own cost, any number, say one thousand, of small bottles of arnica, to be distributed amon<r the common soldiers. Many of the officers of the Fusileers provided them- selves with this irrand wound medicine. Mr. Headland's offer was taken no notice of. It was l/'i,-!;c:l by the medical authorities. Some time there will be a judg- ment on back parlors, and the trumpet psalm of that day will contain the text : " The dark places of the earth are full of cruelty.'-'
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 45
happen 3000 miles away. Sir Benjamin, you are the accredited centre of the public health department of the^e realms; and your in- fluence as such radiates throughout the circle of the British domin- ions. 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 3000 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?
80. 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 lead- ers in The Times on pure water, drains, and town decency, and in- trenched yourselves in a most respectable recommendation to the sweetest cleanliness. For the rest, if 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 sup- pose you did not know of another substance termed veratrum, also similarly and complementarily preventive. Had you and your medi- cal 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 have saved you reams of printing about meteorology and fungi, and the public would have blessed your name for cancelling the pestilence, or better still, they 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 pre- ventives, 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
46 AVAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OP HEALTH.
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 led an immunity in his mind from the gripe of the dis- : and this alone is a signal safeguard against its invasion. The first ellect 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 Homoe- opathy! 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 Stale ? 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 pro\&ed, in many previous inva- sions of the same disorder! And yet more marvellous still, the only alleged preventive, never so much as mentioned in your jaunty re- ports, which are full of fine matters for British associations and ab- stract philosophers ! matters of the same moment to io-day's panic- stricken, and pestilence-stricken, as Lord Rosse's researches among the nebula;, 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 Homosopathy is anathema marantha. 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 Hornreopathy you have flouted, is the only ser- vant which the State 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.
81. And what did you and the packed Board do when the cholera came ? Why. you became, by self-appointment, 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 lit- tle 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 heal- ing angel ! If you had had any general medical instructions to com- municate, 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 the cloaca maxima and all the little cioacte 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 corpse«would no longer come between the wind and your nobility.
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 47
You and The Times could go to your pillows well after so great a sacrifice to the human conscience! I must however rouse you from your opium.
82. 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 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 ab- stinence 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 tincture 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 tum- bler, twenty grains, or as much as will lie on a farthing, of cuprum, tritu ration, 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 ap- pears to be setting in after these remedies have been administered for some hours, don't budge an inch in hope, but give in the same way as the veratrum, carbo vegetahilis, tincture, n. 3 ; and in two hours, if no better, alternate it with stramonium, tincture, n. 3. By the time this has been done, the homoaopath will have arrived, and in thou- sands of cases to patients rescued from the grave.
83. Have you recommended or tried any of these healers? No. Have they been tried on a great scale by the homoeopaths, and are
* It is well to be recorded that Napoleon III., 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, lor camphor and alcohol are articles little adulterated, and easily mixed, it is to be presumed that that sagacious and determined Emperor gave the order to show good will to Homoeopathy. We read in the Pays of Oct. 25, as one proof "of the deep solicitude felt by the Emperor and the Government for the welfare of the Army/' that " the Emperor has sent to the General-in-Chief of the Army in the East, a considerable number of small bottles containing a preservative against the chol- era." These are, without doubt, Headland's very camphor ; though the Pays ap- parently 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 cam- paign in the Crimea His letters are published, in which he gives his unqualified testimony in favor of Homoeopathy.
48 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
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 sound- ness of body to the most important, community now on earth, distrib- uter 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 sudi 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 have 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 ;* 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 manifestoes. 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 na- tional, and the attention to every direction of the Board immediate. And 4f there is to be compulsory vaccination, why not something of the same kind with regard to prophylactics (preventives), and medi- cines 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 V might be made the means of lessening its great pestilences. Why should they not give slips of paper with di- rections something like those I have detailed, which by their reitera- tion 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 re- covered 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.
* Apropos of the medical education of the community, we shall find that under tjoma-opathy 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 learned, 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 do- mestic 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 homa-opathic medicines that suit their particular constitutions. And when once careful and clever mothers have seen their children's diseases treated. and have learned 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 be)-ond 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 obvi- ous 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 his own moral and medical standing.
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 49
84. 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 calamities 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 order that you may see what you did, when you gave Homoeopathy the go-by. The first was seasickness 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 to 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 here. 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 those who are not seasick to give their less fortunate comrades in their intervals of comparative repose, three globules of ipecacuanha, which is of course homoeopathic to sickness. By a steady perseverance in 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 confi- dence from its success. By this means, Sir Benjamin, you would have established a footing, many of our jolly fellows would begin to cease laughing at Homoeopathy, and you would gradually pave the 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 the surgeons, which they would treat in the same way, with coc- culus, petroleum and tabacum, according to circumstances and symp- toms ; ordering the comrades to administer these medicines also. By the time you arrived in the Dardanelles, the whole expeditionary force would have got the germ of a soldier's medical education, and the next steps would be more easy. The number of doctors' cases would have been greatly diminished for the next long voyage, as a considerable proportion of the force would now know well enough the whole routine of the treatment of seasickness. Would they be worse soldiers on that account, or less efficient servants of her Majes- ty the Queen and the British nation ? I opine what the answer will be from her Majesty, and from every man of us.
85. And now, Sir Benjamin, as health minister, had this affair of seasickness nothing to do with your department? And tell me fur- ther, has any other thing than Homoeopathy ever pretended to issue general prescriptions for such a case ? If not, does any thing com- pete 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.
7
50 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
They will rightly smile at the bare thought of being the depositaries of so benign a power.
86. We are now together in Turkey, and our still undiminished 30,000 have a number of minor ailments partly traceable to the cli- mate, and partly to their new conditions. These are more or less epidemic, because like causes produce like effects when applied to large masses of men. The Board which is to be, prescribes for them also in general orders, to the great delight of the medical men, who have only the residue of difficult cases to manage. For observe that 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, is a matter of pay. But I do 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 ; I no sooner mention the spot than you are there, just like Mrs. Wagstaft", 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 going in knee-deep: you knew that many would go overhead. What did the Health Minister do ? They had to go there, be it ob- served, 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 nothing. If you had then been a clear King of Health, higher in vigor by a whole head than the best among us, and if you had had your staff' of faithful healers in all the armor 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 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 allo- paths, 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 triumphant against these fevers from the Mississippi to the Ganges ; it has immeas- urably beaten all the calomel and all the quinine on their own fields ; it has robbed and bearded death in many a swamp and jungle ; it has in- jured no constitution and retarded no convalescence ; yet it was not respectable enough, not to the taste of the flunky Times enough, to be allowed to rescue our poor fellows on the morasses of the Euxine.
87. 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 paro- dy for the homeless soldier. Perhaps you also lost the opportunity of treating and converting the Duike 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
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 51
bygones be bygones ; only remember that we have furthermore al- ready found you equally in complete voidance of your Health Min- istry, 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 Im- perial Allopathy has cost the country 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.
88. 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 examina- tion in general usefulness ? Dost thou leave the bruised on the march to get unbruised again as best they may? And is the Health Minis- ter, 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, 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 WQunded with marching, inflammation will be stopped at the begin- ning; and if his hands are blistered by carrying sand bags, 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 can- celled by this simple means : an army, two armies, will have learned 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 ,ot work that no longer belongs to them, can treat with rhus (a complement vulnerary to arnica), and then after that the armies will have learned the use of rhus too, and can release the doctors from another circle of cases.
89. 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 medi- cal staff to meet the wants of the casualty patients, is the subject of beautiful leaders in the Leading Journal, which will not lead the con- tributors to its fund to expend any of their <£200 checks upon arnica
52 AVAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
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 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 feet: purges for inflammatory symptoms : but this plan is inapplicable here. The plan of Homoeopathy is the same at Bala- klava as it is in Westminster: take arnica repeatedly, and use it ex- ternally if you can: if not, persevere with it internally. You will be on parade for the morning gun, and if stiff, you will still be safe ; and you will go cheerily on and about until the fortress capitulates.
90. The fault then of your Board is, that it can give no general orders, and can make no use whatever of the brains of the troops to enable them to be its assistants in the medical work ; in consequence of which the soldiers are medically just as little informed of their part at the end of a campaign or twenty campaigns, as they were when they left the Waterloo Bridge Station. They say that a man is either a fool or a physician at forty, but the poor trooper, if he at- tained the age of Methuselah, would on your present way of dealing be a medical fool as long as he lives. A strange Russian jealousy this, in the old system : it can't attend the people when struck down with the spiked truncheon of the accidents of war ; and it won't teach them to help themselves. The dog in the manger, rampant, shall be the arms of the packed Board from henceforth.
91. But this jealousy has another ramification ; it opposes the em- ployment of many instructed assistants 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 mani- festoes 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
# Hear what DR. ELLIOTSON 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 bleed, and physic, and mercuri- alize, and insLst upon low diet, and give stuporifics when he ought to do none of these things, and m;ay cause the patient to grow ten times worse, and, at last, to die. He may give meat, strong soup, wine, brandy, or porter when these are all perni- cious. He may give bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter : and moreover may tor- ment the patient, perhaps a little innocent sensitive child, with useless blisters, moxas, issues, setons, hery liniments, incessant nauseous draughts, and cruelly harass the poor creature woo is unfortunately in his power through poverty, or, as is very common among all ranks, through ignorance of his incapacity, — an ig- norance which renders innumerable patients infatuated with the grossest block- heads who were ever licensed to practise and do mischief ' impune per totam ter- rain.' Such objections are absolute twaddle."
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 53
so brazen (out of the immediate vicinity of Printing House Square) as to affirm or even to surmise that more could have died.
92, 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 agreement that they will faith- fully 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 Homoaopathy the practice of healing to this extent is an ex- ceedingly 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 Min- istry 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 prac- tice in such a case cannot indeed be said to be 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 !
93. 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 impend- ing and striking for long ages. But then they shiver out again, u Only think of having as competitors the conceited nurses of the Crimea, — flushed with victory over wounds and pestilences, — popu- lar as women alone, and good and brave women can be, — the 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. In 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 be 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 Homcsopathy; 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
54 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
too long been excluded. In all respects one half of medical practice belongs 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 tends, with such an anticipation of correctness as no physician can safely disallow. Were this intuition fixed and educated, it would readily pass into stable medical insight. Her fine senses animated by this, might soon eclipse the corresponding organism in the man in sev- eral 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 rapid- ity ; 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 higher 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 her beautiful powers can expand. It is a great thing for any thing when new blood comes into it ; and the newer the blood the less bounded is the hope. What then may we not augur for medi- cine, when an entire better 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 remedial touches delicate beyond compare. The appearance of woman upon the world's stage as a healer belongs to the present hour, and in its breadth was impossible before Homoaopathy came. She can have no material function with old physic, which shuts itself 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 and a set of remedies that will not soil them. The keen edge 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.
94. 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 Water- loo. 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 disor- derly crowds they have followed all armies since wars were made. Why should they not now follow in well-appointed bands of charity ? And for another thing, why should they not be instructed in homoe- opathic 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 shut-
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 55
ting 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 eye witnesses. 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.
95. This reform has many nuclei, — little centres from which the newness is growing, nor perhaps will it end until Doctresses are prop- erly seated in all our large communities. A beginning has been made in the United States, and by two highminded English ladies, who have each passed through an entire curriculum of medical stud- ies, 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. 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 I am thankful for her as a pres- ence 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, assid- uous 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 difficult to equal; and at last she went up for her examina- tion, passed it, and took her degree. When she left college, the Pro- fessor again addressed his class ; he acknowledged that his admoni- tions had been honorably fulfilled, and that never before had he known within those walls so thorough an obedience to decorum. And he added that for this cause, he should always 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 medi- cal emergency, and be entitled to prescribe with a cool head what she had learned with so much labor, and was bent to practise with so pow- erful a volition. And there are many others of the same sort both in England and America, though they have not yet had breathing room to come forth. I know that excellent 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 evoked in such a character by
56 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
the new wants of the world. People are born for such gigantic works as these : Hygeitc nasciinlur, nonfiunt; and all we have to do is sim- ple 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 hinderance in the rough path of their trial.
96. For my part, Sir Benjamin, I do not think they will come to nought; and I have adduced this case, because it forms a kind of head and front to all I have 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 descrip- tions, will have its fountain of honor, and well-head of information, from educated accredited women of scientific talent and real profes- sional 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 col- leges here have too long been accustomed to be called bid 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.
97. But to return for a moment to the practical subject of nurses for our armies, I would remark that the great omission in the concep- tion 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 info 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 female legion, and make it available for medical service. The sisters of charity are protected by the sanctity of reli- gion ; 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.
98. False medical dignity must, however, come down to an im- mense 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.
99. If there were no other reason, Sir Benjamin, for the commis- sioning of ladies and subordinate females in this crying hour, you would find a strong one in the extreme difficulty you will, I fear, ex- perience, in procuring the required number of Homeopathic surgeons. You and the country will now find, to grievous cost, what The
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 57
Lancet, The Times, and The Athenanim have been doing for years past, in discouraging all knowledge of Homoeopathy among the medical men, and in browbeating those who were determined to inform them- selves about it They have been only too successful, and now, when you want Homoeopaths to rescue the men from the jaw of those cas- ualties 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 preengaged in the ample services of private prac- tice. In short, they are too few for the people at home. You must therefore advertise far and wide, and take whom you may ; any will be better than the Allopathic incapables, who sit beside the active chol- era, 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 ser- viceable 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 T/ic Athenaeum, have no whit frightened them from studying 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.
100. 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 Judea of old, the light of this burning chastity springs forth in the land of the Harem. For the rest let me watch with reverent amaze, as Providence uncloses these doors, and shows me the aisles of hero women within, and the inter- minable human whiteness of the future.
101. 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 theo- ry, by becoming a soldier, does not cease to be a citizen. Now the citizen at home can adopt Homceopathy if he pleases, without incur- ring 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 signa- ture : and the first question they ask him is, Whether he has taken their medicine ? If he is a Homceopathist, believing to the 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 swallotv the potions to qualify himself for the proper answer. If he declines pill and
8
58 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
draught, he may not get his sick certificate, and is, I understand, lia- ble to be tried by court-martial. If he is known to favor Homeop- athy, 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 alkwho are suspected of Homoeopathy, with what thorough disdain they are treated by the men of diplomas, may easily form some slight 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 Cri- mea with a vengeance, for the freedom of opinion which he dared to assert, and to commit to practice at home. Can you imagine any thing, Sir Benjamin, more derogatory to the manliness of our gallant army, than to be thus coerced by an old-womanish folly of system, 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 foul cup, and spoon smeared with bolus, over a gen- eral, 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 in substance. The army has got so far as that Protestants do not cram Catholics, or vice versa, with unpalatable doctrines ; and why should Allopathy pour its stuff down unwilling throats ? Let there be liberty in medicine, as in other matters of creed. At least let the number of Homoeopaths in the force be ascer- tained— 'tis a vital point for future health — and let the proportion between the medical men of the two systems be regulated thereby. It is so already with the 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.
102. I am sure, Sir Benjamin, after the fever, the cholera, the sick- ness, the drenching, the battle, the march, and the siege, it has been a relief to you to 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 Medical and Surgical Stores for ike Ann//. 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, confi- dently, that the medical officers at Scutari have at their command every thing necessary to the treatment of the wounded soldier ; hence there is no necessity whatever, for any effort being made by the pub- lic," &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
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
59
pounds of calomel ; 150 pounds of contrite jalap ; 1570 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 Scutari. After my previous pages, Sir Benja- min, you will know how to value Dr. Smith's happiness, and the Italics evert/ thing upon which it is founded. My ideas of every thing and nothing are at this moment passing through each other; for what the Doctor calls every thing, I call nothing ; and what he implies as nothing, is for me every thing. Arnica and rhus are the first every thing' for the wounded man; arnica has for ages, merited and got the title, panacea lapsorum: the all-cure of the fallen: 5 pints of arnica, commanded and inserted in the third list by some soul that loves its bleeding fellows, arrive at Scutari ten days after the bloody fair. The list has no veratrum, cuprum, dulcamara, or any of our simples that save men's lives. In one word, Homoeopathy has not 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 every thing to 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 treatment of the wounded soldier." Then let the bitter tears of friends and relations at home, fall upon that narrow cruel " every thing" The country, like "Holy Russia," practically leaves its fallen sons in the 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.
103. 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 discouragement of the holy Czar. I will not put Mr. Urquhart on the scent, but it strikes me that if he 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 British camp just before a great action ; and with every presumption that you intended it, not for the Muscovites, but for our troops! 1000 and odd pounds 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 per- nicious wallet ! Talk of poisoning wells, Sir Benjamin ; that is a trifle to what the Health Minister has sanctioned. A drumhead court martial might have made short work of you. However, I acquit you ; clinging to the hope that you meant the poison for Menchikoff and Nachimoff.
104. Even while I write this, another medical event has occurred which is significant many ways. The Times newspaper by a hint,
60 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
has called forth a subscription from the public of ,£10,000; a sub- scription 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 shows 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 calendula, to make the flesh grow in the gaping places : no sympliytum for the (shattered bones ! No Homoeo- pathic medicine chests ! At the bottom of this well-peaked, protru- sive, 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 have been also shocked to see a letter signed Robert Grosvenor, who is president of a homosopathic hospital, and member for Middlesex, who knows what arnica and Homosop- athy are in his own family, yet has not a word to say in the leading journal, of their application to the British troops. O ! 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 breathed a word of arnica and Homosopathy. 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, indorsed by his noble name. Had he made the right effort, the military journals, whose especial business medical jus- tice to the Army perhaps is, would have given him a sufficient hearing; and then he would not have had the sad reflection of having put his candle under a bushel, at the time when the British Empire craved his little light
105. 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 sup- plies. That greatest surgical discovery of the age, that prompt Lethe, has always been to my mind, one of the greatest realizations of the benevolent " punctuality of Providence." Of course its administra- tion involves skill, and it may be a fair question, whether a, soldier, faint from loss of blood, is a nt subject for the appliance of chloro- form. 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 sharp- ness 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 jas the chances of casualty are confessedly very small,
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 61
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 surgi- cal interference.
106. 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 support you from fainting. I want you to mark all the noble assiduity in that flickering candle- light; the strong skill of the swimmers in that sea of 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 post- poned 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 phy- sic, 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 con- sequence, many lives have been lost, many surgical blunders commit- ted, 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 of hurry, which, though it be the ani- mating breath of old physic, has no part in Homoeopathy ; whose leading motto here also is, tuto, cito, et jucunde.
107. 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 Ho- moeopaths, and often of the Homoeopathic laity, the undoubted action of vulnerary remedies. The late Mr. Listen once told me that " med- icine was a stupid art." He and his brethren are so much accus- tomed 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 med- icines. 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 proba- bility, have been converted to physic by the common soldiers and the nurses. You lost a golden chance there.
62 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
108. As allied to the subject of the drugging of armies, let me commend Homoeopathy to the transport department, on account of the great portability of its means. Two or three chests of drawers xvould have sufficed to contain the Homo3Opathic medicines for the grand army of Xerxes; exclusively of course of the arnica, rhus, ca- lendula 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, 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 in- forms 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 pre- ponderant to a degree almost beyond calculation. Nothing so utterly wastes armies as disease. The damages of 12,000 men dead, and 18,000 hors du combat under Allopathy ; and which make reenforce- ments brought from 3000 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 Raglan " to
* 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 Pro- fessorship of Homoeopathy, and sanctioned the establishment of Homoeopathic Hos- pitals 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 homoeo- pathic system, by Dr. Tessier and his hospital assistants.
" When the Bavarian Parliament and the Hungarian diet, in 1843, unanimously agreed to recommend the merits of Homoeopathy to the favorable consideration of their respective Governments, it was shown, —
" 1st. 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.
"2d. That in severe inflammation, the mortality in allopathic hospitals was nearly 15 per cent., and in homoeopathic hospitals not quite 5 per cent.
" 3d. That in cholera, the mortality in allopathic hospitals was 56, and in homoeo- pathic hospitals under 33 per cent.
" -4th. Tnat the average number of days which the patients remained in the hos- pital was twenty-eight to twenty-nine in allopathic, and from twenty to twenty-four days in homoeopathic hospitals ; and
"