Eyes may catch from heaven their spell, Lips the ruby's light recall; In the Home for Love to dwell One good feeling's worth them all. "Give me Virtue's rose to trace, Honor's kindling glance and mien, Beauty is where these are seen! Of the whitest neck may fall; In the Home for love we know One good feeling's worth them all!" Beauty being the theme with which our chapter commenced, it should also conclude it. We sum up the case then, as legal gentlemen have it, in the words of an American poetess : "Thou wert a worship in the ages olden, A type exquisite of the pure Ideal, Forth shadowed in perfect loveliness Embodied and existent in the Real, A perfect shape to kneel before and bless."* Mrs. Eames. THE MYSTERIES OF MEDICINE. "If physic be a trade, it is a trade of all others the most exactly cut out for a rogue. -Lacon. "Man is a dupable animal. Quacks in medicine, quacks in religion, and quacks in politics know this, and act upon that knowledge. There is scarcely any one who may not, like a trout, be taken by tickling."-Southey. WORTHY Sir Thomas Browne has nobly sought to dignify the medical profession, and it would be undignified in us to attempt to impeach his excellent judgment. There are, however, sundry phases of the Faculty that present points of humor and eccentricity so irresistibly amusing that to indulge a little merriment over them cannot but prove an innocent pastime. There is fun enough in "love, law, and physic," if we seek it out. Any one with an eye for the ludicrous will not need any specifications in point. Much that is farcical in physic is, by the law of electric affinities, transferred to the physician himself. 140 Judging by the latitudinarianism of some practitioners, and the absurd nostrums of empirics and quacks, in all ages, it has been gravely asked, whether doctors are really not the final cause of disease. It is not, of course, to be disputed, that they have been, to no inconsiderable extent, accessory both to the reduction of disease and-of life itself. But for the inherent tendency of mankind to blind credulity and superstition, it may be doubted whether the profession of medicine would ever have been made the vehicle of such gross absurdities and cunning impostures, as its past, and especially its earlier history reveals. We are not about, however, to cast any imputation upon the science of therapeutics; our purpose being to glance at some of the wild and monstrous follies which have so long disputed its claims to the suffrages of society. Medical practice has been defined to be, for the most part, guessing at Nature's intentions and wishes, and then endeavoring to substitute man's. Medication is not the most essential element of cure. Disease is self-limited. Its tendency, in nineteen out of twenty cases, is toward recovery; and that, uninfluenced as to the ultimate result of death or recovery (more or less complete) by any medical interference; unless, indeed, the latter should be murderously severe. Nature," says a French philosophical writer, "is fighting with disease; a blind man armed with a club--that is, the physician-comes to settle the difference. He first tries to make peace; when he cannot accomplish this, he lifts his club and strikes at random. If he strikes the disease, he kills the disease; if he strikes nature, he kills the patient." And to prove, from one who himself turned state's evidence on this point-D'Alembert relates that an individual, after conducting a prominent practice for thirty years, confessed, as his reason for retiring from it, that he was weary of guessing! An industrious nosologist has estimated that there are about twenty-four hundred disorders incident to the human frame! Possibly our great dramatist was not aware to what numerical extent reached "the ills that flesh is heir to," or he would scarcely have so disparagingly suggested that we should "throw physic to the dogs." Or it may be because there is, according to Punch, "an evident affinity between physic and the dogs—a fact that shows the master mind of Shakspeare in suggesting the throwing of the former to the latter; for it is clear that every medicine, like every dog, has its day. Pills have had their popularity, and elixirs have had their run. Lozenges have taken their turn on the wheel of fortune, and even pastes have been stuck to for a time by crowds of adherents." Napoleon once said to one of his physicians (Dr. Antommarchi), "Believe me, we had better leave off all these remedies-life is a fortress that neither you nor I know anything about. Why throw obstacles in the way of its defence? Its own means are superior to all the apparatus of your laboratories. Medicine is a collection of uncertain prescriptions, the results of which, taken collectively, are more fatal than useful to mankind." The celebrated Zimmerman went from Hanover to attend Frederick the Great, in his last illness. One day the king said to him, “You have, I presume, sir, helped many a man into another world?" This was rather a bitter pill for the doctor; but the dose he gave the king in return was a judicious mixture of truth and flattery: "Not so many as your majesty, nor with so much honor to myself." Colman says, "the medical and military both deal in death;" and if true, that two of a trade never agree, it may be the emperor was jealous of his reputation. The death of Pope Adrian occasioned such joy at Rome, that the night after his decease they adorned the door of his chief physician's house with garlands, adding this inscription"To the deliverer of his country." Said an old dramatist "These, sir, Are Death's masters of the ceremonies; It A contemporary observes: "The world is peopled by two classes of beings, who seem to be as cognate and necessary to each other as male and female. Charlatans and dupes exist by a mutual dependence. There is a tacit understanding, that whatever the one invents the other must believe. All bills which the former draws, the latter comes forward at once and honors. One is Prospero, the other his poor slave Caliban. The charlatan tricks himself out in a mask, assumes a deep, hollow voice, and struts upon the stage, while the dupe sits gaping in the pit, and takes every word that drops from the rogue's mouth for gospel-truth and genuine philosophy. would really seem as if the two parties had entered into a solemn compact, that wherever the one exhibited as charlatan, the other, by an absolute necessity, agrees to be present as simpleton. Let the rogue open shop to dispense pills, the simpleton, as soon as he learns the fact, hies to the place of trade, and, pouring down his pence on the counter, takes his box of specifics, and walks complacently away. The knaves seem to consider the world as a rich parish—a large diocese of dunces, into which they have an hereditary and prescriptive right to be installed. They are never at rest until they have some subject on which to hold forth in public; some novel doctrine running against the grain of the old good sense; some antiquated sophism dressed in a new suit, to be put forth to surprise and startle the community, and gather around it (as a gay adventurer) an army of disciples. These men constantly assume an attitude of battle." Addison, who surrounded himself with all the accessories of fortune, seems to have had a depreciating estimate of the Faculty. These are his words: "If we look into the profession of physic, we shall find a most formidable body of men; the sight of them is enough to make a man serious, for we may lay it down as a maxim that when a nation abounds in physicians, it grows thin of people." This body of men he compares to the British army in Cæsar's time-some of them slay in |