SECTION VI.

Empiricim and Quackery-Credulity in Medi

cine.

If man's inherent credulity and love of the marvelous have been made instrumental in subjugating his reason, by means of a factitious theology and a ghostly machinery, effected by a perversion of his religious and social instincts, they have likewise been the avenues through which his legitimate temporal interests have been assailed by designing pretenders to his welfare, in matters connected with his health and life; the instinctive love of which is ever, with him, an object of primary care and solicitude. Diseases are mysterious agents, the causes of which, generally, lie concealed among the hidden arcana of nature, and therefore have too successfully eluded the attempts of the wise for their development. Hence, in periods of ignorance they were conceived to be the inflictions of malign deities, and their removal, consequently, was supposed an appropriate duty of priests and diviners, through the instrumentality of prayers, incantations, and a variety of mysterious agencies.

In Greece, and, in some degree, in Rome, priests were the principal physicians, and medication was administered at the shrines of temples dedicated to the art of healing. There an adequate votive fee insured prescription from the presiding god himself, who was introduced to the credulous patient, doubtless by the optical deceptions heretofore alluded to; or, in the case of patients of lesser consideration, through his intermediate agent the priest. It is to be presumed, however, that a large portion of the afflicted of disease, were not of sufficient consideration, or that they did not possess the means requisite to proffer a sacrifice adequate to obtain such distinguished prescription; or that, in consequence of more grave disease, many would be unable to endure the fatigue of a personal attendance at the templar fountain of health. Such were necessarily assigned to the care of the empirics, or ancient quacks. These, by confident assurances, by incantations, by magic and incense, with the pretension of propitiating the malign deity, or, more properly, malaria, aided by secret nostrums, like their successors of the present day, did not fail speedily of terminating the disease, or the existence of their patients.

Others, however, of weaker faith in mystery and the marvelous, who reasoned that

disease was but a physical evil, consisting in organic embarrassments induced by the interposition of unfriendly physical elements, were content with physicians possessing a knowledge of its nature and causes, but of far less pretensions. Those who, like Hypocrates and Galen, were educated in the rational or matter of fact schools, who possessed the qualification of a scientific knowledge of the organic structure, its diseases, with their causes, and the agents which observation had suggested as efficacious in their removal, it is to be presumed, possessed the confidence and the patronage of their wise and reasoning cotemporaries. Such, disdaining to barter truth for a popular reputation, or temporary interest, have, by their labors in the field of science, not only added a redeeming lustre to human nature, but have erected to themselves monuments of fame, which the intelligent in all succeeding ages have venerated, and to whose names will ever be yielded a due homage of gratitude, while those of their boasting and popular rivals have long since passed into merited oblivion..

In the period succeeding the downfall of the Roman Empire, in which science and literature were nearly extinguished, delusions, dark and deep, took possession of the minds of a large portion of mankind. Reason then

appeared divested of its legitimate supremacy in the conduct of human actions, and knavery and imposture flourished with a success unparalleled in the history of nations holding pretensions to civilization. Medical science, during this period, became merged in the grossest empiricism, and, as a consequence, the most absurd theories relative to diseases and their causes, were embraced by popular credulity, with an avidity proportionate to their discordance with reason, and the less interesting deductions of common sense.

The principal object of the pretended sciences of this period, seemed to be the development of the supposed sublime mysteries of alchemy and astrology. The first of these depicted visions of the philosopher's stone, to which knavery and credulity alike ascribed a power of transmutation of the baser metals into gold, the universal solvent, and the famous Catholicon, by whose power it was hoped, that a state of immortal youth might be sustained by its resistance to the hitherto mutable character of the human system; while⚫ the latter assumed to unfold the astral influences on the organic system and its diseases, together with the nature of plants and other remedies. These, by virtue of a corresponding influence, derived from the same mysterious source, were presumed appropriate to