|
- 163 -
which Hippocrates has done, by first marking Nature
with his name, and afterward letting her loose upon sick
people."
Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, Professor in Harvard University,
declared himself "sick of learned quackery."
Dr. James Johnson, Surgeon to William IV, King of
England, said:
"I declare my conscientious opinion, founded on long
observation and reflection, that if there were not a single
physician, surgeon, apothecary, man - midwife, chemist,
druggist, or drug on the face of the earth, there would be
less sickness and less mortality."
Dr. Mason Good, a learned Professor in London,
said:
"The effects of medicine on the human system are in
the highest degree uncertain; except, indeed, that it has
already destroyed more lives than war, pestilence, and
famine, all combined."
Dr. Chapman, Professor of the Institutes and Practice
of Physic in the University of Pennsylvania, in a published
essay said:
"Consulting the records of our science, we cannot
help being disgusted with the multitude of hypotheses
obtruded upon us at different times. Nowhere is the
imagination displayed to a greater extent; and perhaps
so ample an exhibition of human invention might gratify
our vanity, if it were not more than compensated by the
humiliating view of so much absurdity, contradiction,
and falsehood. To harmonize the contrarieties of medical
doctrines is indeed a task as impracticable as to
arrange the fleeting vapors around us, or to reconcile the
fixed and repulsive antipathies of nature. Dark and
|
