The Element of Physic in Medical Practice
The Element of Physic in Medical Practice becomes constantly more simple. Our drugs are fewer and less complicated.20 Of course it is all otherwise in pseudo-medicine. Here “specifics” are as rank as weeds. Here little account is taken of natural provisions for the cure of disease. Here physic is everything, and nature and the physician are unimportant. Given the symptoms of a disease and a book of “testings,” every old lady thinks herself as competent a physician as Hahnemann. Every disease and symptom of disease has its corresponding remedy, or rather we should say two remedies, for it will nearly always be found that homœopathic patients take two medicines, in equal doses and with equal frequency. Homœopathy abounds in principles. Its great principle is that of “specifics”—that certain medicines have the most definite and designed relation to certain ailments—are the thing and the only thing. Then there is what we may call the alternating principle, in virtue of which two medicines—each, we suppose, a specific!—are so much better than one. Upon these two principles the enlightened patron of homœopathy is made the receptacle of a most unprincipled amount of physic. We conclude by impressing upon our brethren who are studying medicine in the light of reason and science, the urgency of the duty that devolves upon them of so using the element of physic in medical practice as to make more and more apparent the great gulf that is fixed between their practice and the rival quackeries of the day. Let them use medicine so that the most undiscerning patient will perceive that it is only one of many means to an end, auxiliary only to great provisions in the body itself, and for the most part acting, not mysteriously, like quinine, but sensibly or chemically. Let the form of their drugs be unpretentious and inexpensive, so that whatever the cost to the patient may be, he may understand that he pays, not for physic, but for the attention, the skill, and the judgment, of the physician.—Lancet.