MEDICINES: THEIR USES AND ABUSES.

MEDICINES are undoubtedly a gift from God, intended to relieve suffering, and assist Nature in the cure of disease. This is a fair inference, from the fact that some medicines certainly do, under some circumstances, relieve pain, and do assist Nature in the cure of disease; and whatever good in Nature anything can do for man it was undoubtedly intended to do, the world being understood to be made for man, and everything in it intended to subserve his interests. But it is universally admitted that medicines, as they have been and still are generally used, do also much harm; indeed, it is the opinion of the best physicians that

Medicines have always done much more Harm than Good.

Sir Astley Cooper, the most celebrated English practitioner of the last generation, has left on record his opinion, that, on the whole, more harm than good is done by medication.

Dr. Worthington Hooker, of New Haven, in his prize essay, published in 1857, says he believes that the peculiar form of typhus fever which prevailed some years ago in New England, and which, being treated

with stimulants, was very fatal, "was often, in fact, a brandy and opium disease."

Dr. O. W. Holmes, in his address of May 30, 1860, makes this admission to the Massachusetts Medical Society : "Throw out opium, throw out a few specifics which our art did not discover, throw out wine, and the vapors which produce the miracle of anesthesia, and I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind, and all the worse for the fishes."

Now, no one who believes the Bible will affirm that these are the legitimate effects of medicine, for the record is that "God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good." If this be a true record, there must be something wrong in the dogma of what is called "rational medicine," which is so often quoted by the leading men of that school, and so ludicrously referred to in the foregoing quotation from Dr. Holmes.

"Drugs, in themselves considered, may always be regarded as Evils," a false idea.

This idea is not consistent with their own belief in regard to the effects of some medicines, for four or five drugs are known to rational practitioners under the name of alteratives, or specifics, "to produce a secret change in the system favorable to recovery from disease,' and this in doses so small as to be tasteless, and to produce no perceptible evils; and hundreds are

equally well known, to new school practitioners, to produce similar effects. And is it reasonable to suppose that other drugs are intended by Nature to effect a cure only by producing such serious evils as to make it a question whether the effects of the medicine or the effects of the disease are most to be feared? Is it not more "rational" to suppose that drugs, like every other blessing from God, are intended for good, and for good only, and that the wrong application of them produces the evils which are known to result from them? illustration: in testing my old school drugs in my new school practice, and this is the best use to which I can apply my knowledge of crude drugs, I find constant corroborations of this belief.

For

In using rhubarb, or calomel, for example, as I often did in operative doses, for the cure of diarrhoea, the patient was reduced and his digestive functions were deranged, but the disease was cured; and, until I learned the truth, I was reconciled to the evils on account of the benefits of the medicine. But I now

find rhubarb or calomel much more useful in the same disease, in doses too small to reduce the patient or derange his digestive functions; and the inference, to my mind, is fair, that in large doses the cure was effected in spite of the active operation, and not on account of it. I have tested many medicines in the same way, with this uniform result: where large doses of medicine will cure a disease, with accompanying evils, small doses will accomplish the same end without such evils.

And yet, so universal is the opinion that medicine can do no good except in a form in which it is capable of doing harm, that we meet this argument against diluted medicine everywhere. "I knew of a child that swallowed a whole bottleful, and it did him no harm," and this is supposed to settle all controversy on this subject.

Surely such doctrines as these came neither from the "book of Nature," nor from the "book of Grace," for in these nothing can be found to correspond with this idea of doing "evil that good may come." They came from an age when the light of Nature had shone but very dimly, and when the light of the gospel had not yet dawned upon the world.

Hippocrates, the acknowledged father of "rational practice," who wrote three hundred years before the Christian era, expressed so very exactly the sentiments of Professor Holmes, in his "Currents and Counter Currents in Medical Science," from which the foregoing quotation was taken, as to form, at least, a wonderful coincidence, the only discoverable difference being this: Hippocrates, "lest Nature might be disturbed in her wholesome operation on the matter of disease," never, in any case, gave medicine till after the most active symptoms had subsided, while the professor does make an exception in favor of three or four diseases which the specifics are adapted to cure. The improvement in rational practice in two thousand years amounts, then, to simply this: A specific has been discovered for the itch, for syphilis, and for intermittent fever, and possi

bly for some two or three other diseases not named by the professor.

but they are

Except the medicines

adapted to cure these interesting diseases, so wonderfully favored by Nature, the professor firmly believes "that if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind, and all the worse for the fishes.” He does offer to "throw out" wine and opium, which Hippocrates undoubtedly used, and the anaesthetic vapors, which, though not understood to cure disease, are undoubtedly a great blessing to mankind.

This, then, is the condition of rational medicine in the middle of the nineteenth century. There are known to be thousands of varieties of diseases, and thousands of varieties of medicines; and a few of these diseases have medicines adapted to their cure; but all the rest of the diseases are to be trusted to Nature for cure, and all the rest of the medicines are to be thrown into the sea, as worse than useless. But have we not here a marvellous exception to the uniformity of Nature's laws?

light to act fishes in the

We never

We never find an eye where there is not upon it. And so uniform is this law that Mammoth Cave are made without eyes. find an ear but where sound can put it in action; we never find a living thing, down to the invisible animalcule, that has not its appropriate nourishment at hand. And is it not strange that only a few of the thousands of diseases should have their appropriate remedies? Shall we call that "rational medicine" which teaches