ture allowed me to get better. Again, I have had chronic lumbago, and have crawled out of my bed and gone to my work full of pain and suffering, and I have gotten well of this without taking any medicine. I therefore say that while cures can be, and I believe are, effected by medicines, it does not follow that when a patient gets well he has been cured by the medicine he received from a physician.

Again, when we have a patient agonized with pain, it seems to be folly to expect a single dose of medicine to do him any good, and still greater folly to ask him to wait a week or two for a cure, especially when we know that the vis medicatrix naturæ would unaided produce a cure in less time. We are all followers of Hahnemann, but we are lectured and lectured, because, forsooth, some of us have ideas in advance of Hahnemann. It is monstrous, in the minds of some gentlemen, for us to hold an opinion of our own, or to have learned anything that Hahnemann did not know years and years ago. If Hahnemann could know that we had pledged ourselves to do nothing in medicine that he did not do, and to know nothing that he did not know, he would be disgusted, and would doubtless regret that he had promulgated his homœopathic doctrines to be a stumbling-block in the way of progress. If we were to take the Organon as it is and have no other book, we would be as non-progressive as the Chinese. I do not believe in this doctrine of standing still. If I have a human being suffering and can aid him in any way, by homoeopathy, by allopathy, by adjuvants, by morphia, I feel myself bound to do it. I prefer homoeopathy to any other method of practice, and I always use it when I can; but I do not feel bound to it, to the exclusion of everything else. When I give a man a dose of morphia, I do not claim to be curing him homeopathically or otherwise; but I am doing the best I can for him according to the best lights I have, and that is my duty. We should remember that we are physicians as well as homoeopathists, and the duty of the physician is to heal the sick. Let us look upon each other's ways and measures charitably, and not arrogate to ourselves a superiority because we do not do as others do, nor because we do not follow Hahnemann to the letter.

DR. LEWIS BARNES, Delaware, O.: I have been studying the system of homoeopathy as faithfully as I could for thirty years. I began the study of it with a little different training from that which some other persons have enjoyed. I was trained as a lawyer, and learned to look upon testimony as a lawyer does. I have spent considerable time also in investigating the human body as connected with the mind, and the effects produced upon the body by the mind. I may say in brief that the result was

the acceptance of the homoeopathic law, but not a clear understanding of it. I accepted the law, but I did not and could not accept all the so-called provings, which never seemed to be proven to me. The simple fact that a person takes a certain drug, or an attenuation of a certain drug, and then notes down all the sensations and symptoms he experiences for a week or a month or two, and regards all these symptoms as produced by the drug, seems to me to be perfectly preposterous, when I know how many and varied are the symptoms that may be produced in a sensitive person by the simple operation of the mind. It is astonishing to me that any one can mark down all these symptoms and call them the proving of the drug. I can myself, by the simple operation of my mind, produce a pain in my stomach, bowels, back, kidneys or head, and I can do it in one minute, without the agency of medicine at all, and so can many other persons. When I prove a drug upon others, I first take it myself to see what it can do. How many of the symptoms I note come from the operation of my mind or other causes, and how many from the drug, I cannot always tell; but there are some symptoms I feel pretty sure have been produced by the drug. Thus, if I should take five drops of the tincture of Gelseminum I should be totally blind in less than ten minutes. I confess I cannot produce such an effect by my mind alone, and I am therefore convinced that Gelseminum will produce that effect on me, at least in such a dose.

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Again, one person can operate upon the mind of another, without the latter having any knowledge of it. If you will give a particular drug to a sensitive person, and fix your mind to the idea that he must have certain symptoms, he will be very likely to have some of them at least. I know that this is true of some persons at least. I once experimented with what is called mesmerism. I was a believer in phrenology, and I determined to make a test of it by getting a subject into a mesmeric state, and then applying my hands to the localities of the brain, as you would apply your fingers to the strings of a violin, and getting responses according to the localities touched. Well, I tried this plan and I made a discovery. I placed my finger upon a certain organ, and lo, I got the response! I was delighted; but the next day I found that my fingers had been applied to the wrong spot; so I tried it again, and placed my fingers on the right spot, and lo! the response came again, as satisfactorily as the day before. This ended my faith in phrenology.

I am convinced that we are a peculiar kind of instrument, played upon by circumstances, by influences all around us, and by the influence that one person exerts over another. What

these influences are, where they come from, or how they operate, is beyond our knowledge. Because I find a person has certain sensations while taking a certain drug, even though he may have taken it for weeks or months, I do not consider that there is any evidence that it is the effect of the drug at all. All we can say is that the person has taken a drug, and that he has had such or such a symptom. A great many coincidences of this kind, when the taking of that drug would be followed by the experiencing of that symptom, would be evidence of a strong probability that the two coincidences belonged to each other; and I would not care, in that case, whether the mother tincture or the ten thousandth dilution had been taken. Now, when we turn to our Materia Medica, we find there such a complexity of symptoms laid down as the effects of drugs that it is impossible for any intellect, however gigantic, to compass it. In all the prominent drugs you will find symptoms greatly similar to each other under the head of each, and you will find nearly all the symptoms of disease under any of them. I remember once a professor of Materia Medica in one of our colleges making complaint of his students. He said that when he undertook to correct them in any mistakes they made in assigning a certain symptom to a certain medicine, they would insist that they were right, and the worst of it was, he said, they would take the Materia Medica and prove themselves to be so.