Athothis : a satire on modern medicine / by Thomas C. Minor.

the authors they follow. Sift the few grains of wheat from the mass of chaff; recollecting, meanwhile, that the wisest and hardest working doctors that ever lived only acquired small knowledge after years spent in contempla- tion. Frequent your dissecting-room, and study well your anatomy and physiology, perusing the works of standard writers only—those writings that time and ex- perience have shown to be the best. Forget not that the medicine of to-day is overcrowded with incorrect physi- ological and pathological reflections that tend to the ex- clusion of a dignified system of therapeutics; for recent works on materia medica and therapeutics are the mere dogmatic utterances of a few experimentalists, whose conclusions are based largely on erroneous observation— methods that really deal with abstruse chemico-patho- logical questions viewed from an experimental stand- point. I believe that eight out of ten people dying at the present day perish not as much from ignorance in diagnosis as from a want of proper therapeutic knowledge and common sense on the part of so-called scientific practitioners." "Your opinion is to be respected," quoth the student; "but, nevertheless, you seem to favor the views of Boer- haave, who insists that all the good a few true iEscula- pians have done for mankind has been more than offset by a multitude of pretenders whose reasoning being fallacious redounds to the injury rather than the benefit of humanity; yet a study of vital statistics fully evi- dences the fact that the average longevity of our modern people has been increased since medicine became a science, and not a mere empirical art. What stronger proof can any intelligent mind demand ? For, in all candor, you must confess that the practitioner of to-day