An English country practitioner, when asked by a lady patient the intention of three different draughts which he had sent, replied that one would warm, the second cool her, and that the third was calculated to moderate the too violent effects of either. Dr. Beach, who relates this story, on what he conceives excellent authority, gives vent to professional indignation, by exclaiming: "Thus it is that discredit and contempt fall upon the use of medicines, which ought only to attach to the ignorant pretenders or designing knaves who administer them.” EXPERIENCE IN RELATION TO THE PRACTICE OF PHYSIC. THERE is a well-known proverb which, out the light of principle for guide, or says, "Two of a trade can never agree." | anything better than guess-work for Like many other old proverbs, it smacks prompter. of wisdom. It applies to professions as well as trades, and to the medical pro fession with peculiar force. Medical men cannot agree at all. They differ not only on matters of detail, but on matters of principle ;—matters, therefore, which lie at the very root of that healing art they in common possess. An old practitioner told us he thought | errors of experience more common than errors of imagination. We supposed him to mean that experience without judgment is more misleading than ima. gination with it. Thus interpreting his thought, we have no objection to it. Assuredly, experience has been stock-intrade for all parties, however dissimilar their practice. It may, indeed, be made to fit every theory, just as a nose of wax may be made to fit every face. Not an elegant prescription concoctor but will tell you his "villainous compounds are justified by experience. Not a practitioner of any school but will tell you that experience is for his school and, against every other. But are we therefore to reject experience? By no means. Without it all practice must be most criminal gambling-the worst possible game of hazard; and yet experience deceives us, or rather we deceive ourselves; for experience never lies; but professional, like other men, will judge when they have not sufficient experience, or when their supposed experience is of the unreal, fictional kind, which tested vanishes, and as some "insubstantial pageant faded, leaves not a rack behind." " " We proceed to illustrate these observations, by passages from printed works of medical practitioners. Themselves being judges, their method is quite unmethodical and mere haphazard, made to look methodical. Themselves being judges, they are pronounced guilty of crimes, sundry and several, against science; as for example, the high, almost treasonable crime of prescribing nushmash, in a manner rather reckless, with Very true, friend Beach; but then every set of practitioners, from gross nushmash, haphazard-ists, down to superfine, sound-principled globulists, accuse each other-call each other pretenders or designing knaves. One, a Medical Botanist, says, (vide Western Medical Reformer, of June, 1837), “ The great mass of practitioners in these latter days are as ignorant of science as the brutes they ride." Dr. Beach says: The file of every apothecary would, furnish a volume of instances where ingredients of the (medical) prescription are fighting together in the dark, or at least are so adverse to each other as to constitute a most incongruous and chaotic mass." Moreover, he quotes from Dr. Paris and Sir Gilbert Blane some anecdotes touching professional matters, also professional men, in a way the orthodox among them are not likely to applaud or relish. Dr. Paris tells how he was told by some provincial practitioner that the quantity, or rather complexity, of the medicines which he prescribed (for there never was any deficiency in the former), was always increased in a ratio with the obscurity of their case. If, quothprovincial practitioner, I fire a great profusion of shot, it is very extraordinary if some do not hit the mark. Sir Gilbert Blane tells how a practitioner being asked by his patient why he put so many in gredients into his prescriptions, is said to have answered, more facetiously than philosophically, "In order that the disease may take which it likes best." A patient in the hands of such a practitioner has not a much better chance than the Chinese Mandarin, who, upon being attacked with any disorder, calls in twelve or more physicians, and swallows in one mixture all the potions which each one separately prescribes. Dr. Prati, self-styled " Alpine Philosopher," says: In the medical art, as well as in all other sciences, those who assumed to be the leaders of the people, have been, for the most part, wordmongers, and approves my Lord Bacon's precept, That it is absurd to expect anything like a true increase of knowledge by mixing up old facts with new errors: that we must go back to first principles, and sift them conscientiously, in order to obtain that true and active natural philosophy which may serve as the basis of medical science.' Dr. Prati expresses infinite contempt and disgust in this short but bitter paragraph :-"A Roman gentleman having written his own will, ended it with the following words: 'Let no lawyer approach-absit juris consultus.' If I ever succeed in establishing an asylum for the insane, I would imitate the good gentleman, and have written at the gate, 'No physician allowed to enter What Dumoulin, the famous French physician, thought of physic, and the ingenious gentlemen who live by it, may be inferred from his dying declaration, that he left behind him two admirable doctors,-river water the one, and regimen the other. Dr. Garth, whose experience of trade tricks was large, discharged many a sharp sarcasm at brother prescribers of nushmash, otherwise "elegant prescriptions." Even the College of Physicians did not escape his sneer, for to that ancient seminary of humbug-absit medicus."" he alludes in the following lines :"Where stands a dome majestic to the sight, And sumptuous arches bear its oval height; A golden globe placed high with artful skill, Seems to the distant sight a gilded pill." Dr. George B. Wood deplores the prevalence of empiricism, which he ascribes in a considerable degree to the popular error, that a favourable termination of disease is always owing to the means employed. "Patients," says this candid doctor, "often survive improper and injurious treatment, and believing themselves cured, naturally acquire confidence in the practitioner, or in the supposed remedy." Again: It cannot be doubted that diseases which, if undisturbed, would have spontaneously terminated in health, have often received an unfavourable turn from officious (though official) interference." According to him, medical men, especially young medical men, should be strongly impressed with the truth, that in the great majority of cases, diseases will end in recovery, whether under treatment or not; and puts for everybody's serious consideration the unorthodox question, how far it may be proper for medical men to interfere in the management of diseases. It would be easy to fill a book with passages in spirit the same as theserather antiorthodox ones-which show (and that is all we here desire to show) the antagonism of medical men, their contemptuous opinion of each other's practice, their ungenerous appreciation of each other's theory, their utter disorganization, considered as a medical body, and the unscientific state of what they call science, and passes for science with the generality of mankind We do not believe that the great mass of modern practitioners are as ignorant as the brutes they ride; but we believe some practitioners are far more obstinate. No medical school is free of error or errorists. No medical practice can resist the force of criticism. Everything connected with the healing art betokens a speedy break-up of all methods and all schools. Doubtless, scientific order will at no very distant date come out of the unscientific disorder, which every one deplores. Just now our doctors contrive excellent arrangements for general confusion. Reformers in medicine are in many respects not a whit better than they who, tenacious of custom, hate innovation, stand by the ancient ways, and cling to antiquated formulas as their only anchor of safety. Shakespeare makes Wolsey with his almost latest breath charge Cromwell to put away ambition, for by that the angels fell. We charge medical men to put away bigotry, for by that, science is obstructed in its march, dishonoured in its essence. The bigot never finds the truth, or if he finds it, knows it not What more admirable than water as a curative element? Yet water-curers are sometimes bigots. Their folly consists in saying it is water, and nothing but water, will do in all cases, or always cure, where cure is possible. Disciples of Mesmer, disciples of Priessnitz, disciples of Hahnemann, in modern days, are no less obstinate, no less addicted to bigotry, than were disciples of Galen, and of Hippocrates, in ancient times. Thus Allopaths laugh at HomoeopathsHomœopaths laugh at Hydropaths Hydropaths laugh at Herbalists-Herbalists at Mesmerists. The wise practitioner of either school admits there is some truth in all the pathies, all the isms, and all the ologies too; but experience, which often (proverb notwithstanding) fails to make fools wise, demonstrates in manner unmistakeable by wisdom, that all truth is not to be found in any one of the pathies, any one of the isms, or any one of the ologies. Paracelsus pronounced himself Primus Medicorum; Priessnitz thought himself so, although he did not, like Paracelsus, say the most foolish hair of his head knew more than all the doctors. Hahnemann thought himself model physician, as so he is declared by his disciples. Mesmer had his full share of conceit; and we suspect that neither Galen nor Hippocrates were troubled with superfluous modesty. How few judge rightwise judgment concerning systems and system founders, ancient or modern. How few can separate the wheat from the chaff of pathies, isms, or ologies. How few act out fearlessly, and without prejudice or bigotry, the above-quoted precept of Bacon. "With few exceptions," says Dr. Prati, "the errors which prevailed at the time of Discorides continue still to frustrate the useful discoveries of our more enlightened century." One, and perhaps the principal error, is the fiction that such or such a drug is possessed of some general medical property. We have now before our eyes several of the most esteemed Materia Medicas; that is, the natural history of substances employed in medicine, and we find them teeming with broad assertions which are, for the most part, idle and void of truth. The most heterogenous substances are classed under the name of antispasmodic, anodyne, strengthening, even curating, diuretic, febrifuge, and the like. Yet when we examine the mode in which such drugs are administered, we find that the imagination of the doctor has attributed to a favourite remedy the proclaimed quality, at the same time that he mixed up with them other remedies, which each in their kind could produce similar or different results. These different drugs are acting, according to his fancy, a particular part, with the same passive obedience, as if they were drilled into military discipline. Each, according to their imagined faculty, bears a proper name; the one is called the active ingredient; the second is the (adjuvans) auxiliary; the fourth, the receiving; and so forth. The second error is to have imagined general names of diseases, which, each in their kind, are different, and which almost in every individual are differently shaped. Such names as fever, fits, cardialgy, epilepsy, and the like, are like the letters in algebra, signs which denote ever-changing and imaginary entities, often non-entities. Homœopathy has nothing to do either with the imaginary general qualities of remedies, nor with the imaginary names given to diseases. It does not deal with compound recipes, nor does it trust in any experiment, but that which is made upon the living healthy body. The Homœopath knows that experience has been hitherto a self-delusion of the medical practitioner. We have before us some numbers of the Medical Journal and the Lancet. They inform us that within twenty-four hours a physician prescribes digitalis, opium, and bleeding; the man is dismissed as cured from the hospital, after having been for several days submitted to the same treatment. We ask whether any sound logical deductions can be made from this experience? Another doctor vaunts of blood-letting to exhaustion in hydrophobia, and yet the patient was taking an enema of laudanum and strong mercurial frictions. A woman was dismissed as cured of rheumatic pains from one of the hospitals, under the supposition of her being cured by the hydrodate of potass, yet the iodine and the oleum croton were applied externally. Not long since a man was treated for a disease, called by the doctor purpura hæmorragica. Zinc ointment, beef-tea, three eggs a day, nitrate and carbonate of soda, of each fifteen grains every three hours, were employed simultaneously, besides as much wine as the patient liked. He died. Did this man die of natural death? What experience can be gathered from such scientific mystification? We reply at once to the question-None of the least value. But even that reply, bold and rash as to some timid" thin-skinned" medical reformers it may seem, does not adequately represent our idea, which is that experience originating in scientific mystification, does, in ninety-nine of every hundred cases, mystify and mislead the man who trusts to it. Of such experience, therefore, we say, it is worse than valueless. It is almost always injurious to the full extent of its application. Unhappy the practitioner who puts his trust in partial, ill-gathered, ill-judged, or perhaps unjudged experience; for he will find it a broken reed, which not only fails, but cruelly wounds the hand that rests upon it. These things, we say, not to bring experience into contempt, not to shake professional faith in it, but to warm all parties against SELFDELUSION, which we confidently believe may oftener be traced to insufficient or unripened experience than to full-blown fancy or imagination. is just. What is congenial to one's own original conception, may, without doubt, be imbibed in every seminary of learning; but on that very account professional men should keep close watch over their own tendency to "imbibe;" for learning agreeable to original conception, is not always agreeable to known truth; and thus it happens that "seminaries of learning" foster ignorance, perpetuate error, offering the useful as a sacrifice at the shrine of the "congenial." No prejudices ranker than those "imbibed" by students in "seminaries of learning.' Let medical men consider this, when reflecting upon or discussing their several methods and principles. Let them consider the danger of relying too confidently upon too small a number of facts, or making the sad and quite common mistake of supposing fictions facts, and facts fictions. A little knowledge with strong judgment is far less dangerous than a great deal of knowledge with weak judgment. Power to wisely judge is the power after all. Without it, facts are made mere props for falsehood, and the history of experience becomes the history of prejudices. Look abroad, then, ye physicians, and beware of yourselves, for your original conceptions are not formed on the broad basis of knowledge, but on the confined and obsolete basis of orthodoxy. Learn of Hahnemann, Priessnitz, and Mesmer, of Gall, and Spurzheim. Admit all these principles into your seminaries, and you may stand a chance of recovering your science from the degradation to which posterity will assuredly judge it, if you continue your bigoted and unphilosophical method of trading upon human frailties, and imposing upon mankind a rotten and unscientific system. PHRENOLOGICAL SKETCH OF FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. WERE we to choose among all the female heads which it has been our privilege to scan Phrenologically, the most perfect sample of feminineness, according to our science, our choice would rest on the philanthropic lady whose portrait we are glad to lay before our readers. Every line expressive of temperament shows the finest organic grain and texture. The shape of the hand and fingers, the whole contour of the body, the length of face, the expression of mouth and eyes, but most of all, the extreme height and length of head from the eyebrows over to the occiput, in conjunction with the narrowness of the base, indicate the very highest order of both exquisiteness of feeling and elevated moral sentiment. Those apparent depressions between the ears, signify the almost utter deficiency of selfishness and sensuality. As well accuse an angel of voluptuousness, as |