stage, especially when tedious, change of air often establishes health when drugs have no effect.

Diet.-During the early stage, and especially when the children are confined to the house, the food ought to consist of milk, bread, fruits, and various farinaceous articles. As the disease becomes more formal, and more exercise taken, the ordinary diet may be resumed; but the meals ought to be more frequent than full. Whey has been much recommended.

In obstinate cases of vomiting where medicines fail (which will be a rare occurrence) coffee, as recommended by Barthez and Rilliet, may be tried.

Water appliances.-Allusion has already been made to the use of hot and tepid baths when there is nervous irritation, or commencing inflammation. As soon as the catarrhal stage has passed cold water may be used, either by sponging the chest morning or evening with cold water, or by having the water thrown quietly over the child, especially the chest and back. It may be safest not to wet the head. Dr. Todd recommends a fair trial of this means, as well calculated to diminish the severity of the paroxysms, and to ward off the occurrence of bronchitis and pneumonia. As early as 1768, Dr. de la Vallée recommended the cold water compress to the chest, as a means of arresting the paroxysm, long prior to the introduction of hydropathy. Dr. Hannay recommends the chest to be well rubbed thrice or four times a-day with very cold water; he adds vinegar or eau de cologne, which are unnecessary. The hand being wrapped in a towel, is dipped into cold water, the chest quickly rubbed with this, and then dried with a warm towel.

ON THE LEGITIMATE POSITION THAT HOMEOPATHY SHOULD HOLD IN MEDICINE.

BY DR. TESSIER.*

ASK an allopathic doctor what is homœopathy? he will unhesitatingly reply, "Nothing." Ask a disciple of Hahnemann

* From "L'Art Medical," tom. ii,, p. 81.

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what it is, and he will answer, "Every thing." In medicine homœopathy is then nothing to the majority, but is every thing to the minority.

Apply the same test to allopathy, and the allopath will tell you it is truth, the homeopath will affirm it to be error; so that each being true in the eyes of its partizans, it is impossible to conceive of more decided opposites stated more positively.

These affirmations and denials we hold to be false on either side, for in our opinion neither homœopathy nor allopathy is all true or all false in medicine, but they are truths complementary of each other, and whose legitimate association, and even filiation, we hope to demonstrate. But as our opinion is shared by neither party, it is right that we should explain it in such a manner that the truth should be disengaged from both these extremes, to the satisfaction of those minds that honestly desire it.

I.

Is allopathy nothing but error, as Hahnemann affirms ?
Let us hear what he says on the subject:-

"In order to give a general notion of the treatment of diseases pursued by the old school of medicine (allopathy), I may observe that it presupposes the existence sometimes of excess of blood (plethora-which is never present), sometimes of morbid matters and acridities; hence it taps off the life's blood, and exerts itself either to clear away the imaginary morbid matter or to conduct it elsewhere (by emetics, purgatives, sialagogues, diaphoretics, diuretics, drawing plaisters, setons, issues, &c.), in the vain belief that the disease will thereby be weakened and substantially eradicated; in place of which the patient's sufferings are thereby increased, and by such and other painful appliances the forces and nutritious juices indispensable to the curative process are abstracted from the organism. It assails the body with large doses of powerful medicine, often repeated in rapid succession for a long time, whose long enduring, not unfrequently frightful, effects it knows not, and which it purposely, it would almost seem, makes unrecognizable by the commingling of several such unknown substances in one pre

scription, and by their long continued employment it developes in the body new and often ineradicable medicinal diseases. Whenever it can, too, it employs, in order to keep in favour with its patient, remedies that immediately suppress and hide the morbid symptoms by opposition (contraria contrariis) for a short time (palliative treatment), but that leave the disposition to these symptoms (the disease itself) strengthened and aggravated. It considers the affection on the exterior of the body as purely local and existing there independently, and vainly supposes that it has cured it when it has driven it away by means of external remedies, so that the internal affection is thereby compelled to break out on a nobler and more important part. When it knows not what else to try with the disease, which will not yield or which grows worse, the old school of medicine undertakes to change it at random by means of an alterative-for example, by the life-undermining Calomel, Corrosive Sublimate, and other mercurial preparations, in large doses.

"To render, through ignorance, if not fatal, at all events incurable, the vast majority (99-100ths) of all diseases, those of a chronic character, by continually weakening and tormenting the debilitated patient, already suffering without that from his disease, and by adding new destructive drug diseases-this distinctly seems to be the unhallowed main business of the old school of medicine (allopathy); and a very easy business it is, when once one has become familiar with this pernicious practice, and is sufficiently insensible to the stings of conscience!

"And yet for all these mischievous operations the ordinary physician of the old school can assign his reasons, which, however, rest only on the foregone conclusions of his books and teachers, and on the authority of this or that distinguished physician of the old school. Even the most opposite and the most senseless modes of treatment find there their defence, their

* “For the same object the practical allopath delights to invent a fixed name, by preference a Greek one, for the malady, in order to make the patient believe that he has long known this disease, like an old acquaintance, and hence is the fittest person to cure it."

authority, let their injurious effects speak ever so loudly against them. It is under the old physician, who has been at last gradually convinced of the mischievous nature of his so called art, after many years of misdeeds, and who only continues to treat the several diseases with Strawberry Syrup mixed with Plantain Water (i. e. with nothing), that the smallest number are injured and die.

"This non-healing art, which for many centuries has been in full possession of the power to dispose of the life and death of patients according to its own good will and pleasure, and in that period has shortened the lives of ten times as many human beings as the most destructive wars, and rendered many millions of patients more diseased and wretched than they were originally-this allopathy I shall first expose somewhat more minutely before teaching in detail its exact opposite, the newly discovered true healing art."

A man like this is not always deceived. Let us then see where he is wrong and where right in his judgment of old medicine and medical tradition before his day.

Hahnemann evidently considered the whole of practical medicine to lie in therapeutics, and this confusion of practical medicine with one of its branches is his fundamental error. It explains the excessive contempt he expressed for tradition, which represents the true constitution of the medical art, its division into the three great sciences of physiology, pathology, and therapeutics. Old physic possesses, then, truth in general, and an infinite number of particular truths. On this point Hahnemann is wrong.

On the other hand he is right on the subject of therapeutics in general, and has genius also in criticism, as we shall see that he has in invention. But let him explain himself and develope his thesis "The indications and medications of traditional therapeutics are hypothetical, and their relation arbitrary."

"The partisans of the old school of medicine flattered themselves that they could justly claim for it alone the title of 'rational medicine,' because they alone sought for and strove to remove the cause of disease, and were guided by nature in the treatment of diseases.

"Tolle causam! they cried incessantly. But they went no farther than this empty exclamation. They only fancied that they could discover the cause of disease; they did not discover it, however, as it is not perceptible and not discoverable. For as far the greatest number of diseases are of dynamic (spiritual) origin, and dynamic (spiritual) nature, their cause is therefore not perceptible to the senses; so they exerted themselves to imagine one.

"But this sublime problem, the discovery, namely, à priori, of an internal invisible cause of disease, resolved itself, at least with the more astute physicians of the old school, into a search -under the guidance of the symptoms, it is true-as to what might be held to be the probable general character of the case of disease before them ;* whether it was spasm, or debility, or paralysis, or fever, or inflammation, or induration, or obstruction of this or that part, or excess of blood (plethora), deficiency or excess of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, or nitrogen in the juices, exaltation or depression of the functions of the arterial, venous, or capillary system, change in the relative proportion of the factors of sensibility, irritability, or reproduction-conjectures that have been dignified by the followers of the old school with the title of casual indication, and considered to be the only possible rationality in medicine, but which were assumptions too fallacious and hypothetical to prove of any practical utility.

"However, perceiving that it was more consistent with reason to seek out a straight path, where that was possible, than to take a circuitous course, the old school of medicine believed it might cure diseases in a direct manner by the removal of the (imaginary) material cause of disease.

"A favourite idea of the ordinary school of medicine until recent (would that I could not say the most recent) times, was that of morbific matters and acridities, excessively subtile though they might be thought to be.

* "Every physician who treats disease according to such general characters, however he may affect to claim the name of homœopathist, is, and ever will remain, in fact a generalizing allopath; for without the most minute individualization, homoeopathy is not conceivable."