up in a closet. The wound did admirably, and was fast healing up, when, all at once, it became exceedingly painful. Word was sent to his lordship, who, we may imagine, went immediately to see his poor patient. No, he did not. Nothing of the kind. He went immediately and made a solemn visitation to the axe. What did he behold? The unfortunate instrument of all this mischief had fallen on the floor and partly escaped from its covering. No wonder the poor foot was inflamed and painful! Such a fall must have been a dreadful shock to it. Of course, the axe was properly treated, wrapped up again, and more carefully suspended, and, also of course, the patient recovered rapidly, and without any further discomfort.
These facts, and hundreds of a similar character which might be given, seem just as good as those which are brought to support every medical theory, and which attest the cures of every kind of practice and medicine. Every system, in whatever it may be weak, is strong in its facts. In our day allopathy, homœopathy, hydropathy, and all contradictory systems, are alike in the one important feature. They all appeal to a multitude of unquestionable and truly remarkable cures. Judged by the testimony of its opponents, every medical system is false, a miserable delusion and quackery; but tested by facts and cures, every system is true and a boon to humanity.
The usual mode of accounting for such cures as those which were explained as resulting from sympathy, is by attributing them to faith, hope, or imagination. These are powerful agents over the physical system, though it must be confessed that they do not account for all the facts. What had the imagination to do with the fall of the axe, hung up in his lordship’s closet? But it is doubtless true that expectation is a potent element of cure, and it is one every good physician, as well as every mercenary quack, makes full and constant use of. In many cases of illness, it makes no difference what medicine is given, so that it is not absolutely hurtful, or whether we only pretend to give a remedy. Bread pills, properly administered, produce a great variety of decided operations. Chalk powders, or a few drops of coloured water, act with great efficacy. They are emetic, cathartic, or sedative, as the physician may desire. Fear is believed to kill men in a pestilence by becoming a predisposing cause. Hope cures desperate cases. Lord Anson’s expedition to the South Sea had met with many misfortunes, and his ships that escaped storm and wreck lost almost their entire crews by scurvy. “Whatever discouraged the seamen or at any time damped their hopes never failed to add new vigour to the distemper, for it usually killed those who were in the last stages of it, and confined those to their hammocks who were before capable of some kind of duty.” Captain Cook went into the same seas on voyages of discovery, in which the sailors were constantly excited with adventures or the hope of them, and scarcely suffered from scurvy at all. “A merry heart,” says the Wise Monarch, “doeth good like medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the blood.”
The sweet influence of faith and hope was scarcely ever shown more remarkably than in some imaginative medical practice of the Prince of Orange, in the Siege of Breda, in 1625. That city, long besieged, had suffered all the miseries that constant fatigue, anxiety, and bad provisions could bring upon its inhabitants. The scurvy broke out, and carried off great numbers. This, and the seeming hopelessness of the defence, disposed the garrison to a surrender; but the Prince of Orange, not willing to lose the place, but unable to retain it, contrived to send letters to the soldiers, promising them speedy assistance, and sending pretended medicines against the scurvy, said to be of great price, and still greater efficacy. Three small vials were given to each physician, and it was said that three or four drops were sufficient to give a healing efficacy to a gallon of water. Not even were the commanders let into the secret. The soldiers and people flocked around the physicians in crowds. Cheerfulness was upon every countenance. Many of the sick were speedily and perfectly recovered. Such as had not moved their limbs for a month before, were seen to walk, with their limbs straight, sound, and whole, boasting their cure by the Prince’s remedy.
When we have such facts as these, how are we to discuss or examine the pretensions of any medicine or medical system? And the experience of almost every person can furnish facts of a similar character.
For example, the hands are covered with warts. You try acids, caustic, and the actual cautery, but with no benefit. The old ones grow out again, and new ones are coming. They are uncomfortable and hideous, and you are in despair. Some day a stranger offers, for sixpence, to send them all clean away. He counts them, and writes the number on a slip of paper, which he puts in his pocket, and you see him no more. In a fortnight all the warts, new and old, big and little, have disappeared, and never again return. The man did nothing to the warts—perhaps he anointed the paper; or was it the expectation of cure? You had faith enough to give the sixpence, which you were assured was a mere formality. As to expecting a cure, you probably quite forgot it, until, one day, the annoying excrescences were gone.
A friend of the present writer, an artist and a man of business, had an attack of fever and ague, which, for several months, baffled all the ordinary means of cure. Some one told him of an old German, who had cured many cases, and at last, out of annoyance and curiosity, he went to see him. It is hard to say whether he had faith or hope in the old German; but he knocked at his cabin-door.
“Goom in,” grunted Mein Herr. Our friend entered. “Ah! you got der chills and fever,” said he, without moving from his chimney-corner. “Well, you can go—you won’t have dem any more.”
He went, as he was bid, and did not have another fit of ague. There could scarcely be a cheaper or less troublesome cure; but it is not very easily accounted for.
Elias Ashmole wrote in his Diary, April 11, 1687:
“I took early in the morning a good dose of elixir, and hung three spiders about my neck, and drove my ague away. Deo Gratias.”
Now what drove away the ague? The chips of