down the author as a quack and a visionary,
ln the third, I believe M. Raspail to be,
though in many instances a mistaken, yet in
all cases a thoroughly honest man.

It may also have contributed in no small
degree to the interest I feel in the subject,
that I have, or fancy I have, always
something the matter with me; that I have been,
to niy sorrow, the patient and victim of
professors of every system of medicine, orthodox
and heterodox: from Doctor Sangrado, the
phlebotomisfc and hydropathist, to Doctor
Infinitesimal, the homœopathist; and that
I have suffered in my miserable body almost
every experiment, on this side of amputation,
that the old Latin axiom suggests should
be made in corpora vili. So, with all due
respect to the faculty, to Apothecaries' Hall,
to the Pharmaceutical Society, and to
Buchan's Domestic Medicine, let us see
what M. Raspail can teach us towards that
desirable consummation of—Every Man his
own Doctor.

Health, Raspail maintains, is the normal or
regular state of life, fitting man for the
performance of his natural and social duties.
Illness is the exceptional state; it reduces
him to the position of a useless encumbrance
on society. The art of preserving the health is
called hygiène; the art of recovering or
restoring the health when lost or enfeebled is
called medicine. Now, it being self-evident
that health is a desirable, and disease a
highly obnoxious, state of life, it naturally
follows that the study both of hygiène and
medicine are of the greatest importance, and
should be as widely disseminated as possible;
yet by one of the strange and apparently
inexplicable contradictions of our nature,
mankind seem to have agreed, by a species of
tacit understanding, to neglect or ignore
altogether those branches of knowledge that
concern them most. Thus, while we see
theological lore of the most abstruse and
controversial kind eagerly sought after
among all classes of society; while no man
with any pretence to education would like to
be deemed ignorant of the laws, at least, of
his own country; while the physical sciences
successfully assert their claim to rank as
regular branches of popular education, and
terms of scientific erudition are growing
familiar in mechanics' institutes and young
men's societies; while even that slow-going
gentleman the British agriculturist begins to
smell ammonia, and to conceive some faint
thread of a notion that chemistry may be,
after all, a good thing for a farmer to know;
the study of the laws of health and disease
is almost entirely neglected. Thus far I
agree with M. Raspail. I cannot, however,
go with him quite to the extent of declaring
that the practice of medicine is abandoned to
a small knot of men, by whom this most
noble of arts is degraded to the level of an
ordinary trade, carried on mostly with a
degree of ignorance and presumption that
would ruin the greatest botcher in the
cobbling line. There are too many
illustrious names and established reputations
among the physicians of England and France
to warrant his sweeping assertion: yet M.
Raspail might have strengthened his argument
had he been familiar with the existence
in England—a flagrant, shameless,
unchecked existence, happily unknown in
France—of the gentry who foist their
cartloads of vile and noxious drugs, in the shape
of pills and ointments, upon an ignorant
and credulous multitude—the quacks whose
puffing advertisements are a scandal to our
press, and whose colossal fortunes are a
disgrace to our civilisation.

According to Raspail, the art of medicine
has, for more than two thousand years past,
made no real progress; and one of the latest
inventions of the medical mind, homœopathy,
affords a convincing proof that medicine has
come back to the exact point from which it
started, namely, to the simple dietetics of the
ancient physicians. But, the homœopathists
have ventured (according to him) to erect, on
the simple and rational basis of a proper regimen
as the most natural method of curing
diseases, a dangerous superstructure of
infinitesimals, and monstrous assertions of the
curative power of the "high dynamisation" of
medicinal substances. Yet homœopathy is
surely vastly preferable to the Sangrado
system, to the starving system (I was under
a starving doctor once, when I was too young
to rebel, and if ever I come across him again,
there shall be wailing in the Royal College of
Surgeons, or I will know the reason why), to
the salivating system, and to that most
abominable form of empiricism—experimenting
on the unfortunate victims of dire diseases with
deadly poisons, such as arsenic, strychnine,
prussic acid, brucea, veratrine, hyoscyamus,
atropine, opium, belladonna, digitalis, henbane,
stramony or thorn-apple, nux vomica, and
other members of the distinguished family of
poisons, vegetable and mineral. And especially
is Raspail wroth with "experimentalists"—
"eminent practitioners" who really do
what the poor relatives of hospital patients
suspect them of doing: such men as Bosquillon,
physician of the Hôtel Dieu, who coolly
proceeded one morning, by way of experiment,
to bleed all the patients on the right, and to
purge all those on the left, side of his ward;
or as Magendie, who killed, at one fell
swoop, seven epileptic patients, "just to see
how they would feel alter a dose of prussic
acid."

Illness, according to M. Raspail, is not a
mystery of nature; it is not the result of
some occult influence—some mysterious cause
that eludes the grasp of our senses. An organ
can be affected by illness, or, in other words,
suspend or cease its functions, only from a
want of its proper nutriment, or from some
external cause. The causes of disease are
therefore external: illness, in the first