Part 3.-Selections.

ARTICLE I.

Relations existing between the Clerical and Medical Professions-the Christian Examiner and the Hydropathic delusion. Communicated for the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal.

A recent number of this Journal gives an account of a vote introduced, and laid on the table for future consideration, at the meeting of the Connecticut Medical Society, the intent of which was to rescind that part of the code of medical ethics or usage by which physicians have declined compensation from ministers and their families for professional services. The innovation was based and defended on the ground that the deportment and feelings of the clergy, as a body, had broken off and annihilated that mutual relation of respect and support, on which so kindly a consideration had been so long sustained in New England. This regard to the ministers of the gospel is still more honorable to the physicians, when it is recollected that the service was from the poorer and worse compensated servant of the public, towards the less laborious and better paid; that is, if comparisons can be predicated between classes, both of which are so meagerly provided for as the country brethren.

A writer in a still earlier number, that of February 23d ult., gave some strange-probably before unsuspectedfacts and statistics, demonstrating that colleges, always under clerical control and influence, had, from their very origin, treated the medical calling with a studied neglect, contempt, and omission-so palpable, so universal, as not to be accounted for or explained, on the idea of accident or mere coincidence. The physician has borne it all with "that sufferance which is the badge of all our tribe." This writer demonstrated, by a reference to triennial catalogues and other documentary publications of the colleges themselves, that medical men never had either lot or part in the boards of trustees, examining bodies, or as recipients of

the higher honors, within their trust. In fact, in eighty members of trustee boards, two only are physicians. And in several of the colleges, no medical trustee had ever been appointed. Physicians, elevated to the chair of state, ex officio, alone formed the exception of medical men in this connection.

It would seem, from these indications, that the attention, the self respect, and the esprit du corps of our body have begun to be aroused. The time is approaching when medical men will examine and decide the question whether they are to be treated by the members of a cognate liberal profession as their equals in virtue, intelligence, and aim; whether there shall be that mutual support of callings, neither of which surely, in these latter days of reforms and innovations, can be in imminent danger of being injured by too profuse demonstrations of general respect and consideration.

Which party, in the present antagonistic position, is responsible for the earliest aggression it is not needful to decide, nor which party can least afford this internecine war against each other's standing and interest. Our medical brethren in the interior, who have long borne in silence the officious interference of the clergy in determing a professional preference "amongst their people," in injudicious ministrations in the sick chamber, irrespective of the judgment or wishes of the physician attending, and in partisan efforts towards introducing "a member of our society," into circles of practice already overcrowded, can determine this question.

In the same category with the want of respect for the medical body, and doubtless dependent on the same state of feelings, is the curious propensity on the part of the clergy, always manifested, to patronize, recommend, and puff all kinds of empirical measures and men. Dr. Holmes, in his amusing "Delusions of Homoeopathy," gives many grotesque illustrations of this singular proclivity of ministers to run after wild humbugs and ridiculous cure-alls, as far back as Perkin's Tractors, certified to by half the reverends of New England, who were seduced by the gift of a half cent's worth of brass and pewter; and the same spirit is continued down to this morning's papers, in which the Rev. Mr. Williamson and the Rev. Mr. Drew certify to some asthmatic elixir, under their own sign manual! It is well understood that the venders of

quack medicines are ready to give an extra price for a certificate from a reverend, especially if it closes with a due quantity of devout expressions o fgratitude, equally distributable to the Author of Good and the inventor of the patent medicine!

Now why do the clergy figure so prominently in the annals of quackery, even of the grossest kind? Is it because they would willingly see the educated practitioner driven into the pursuits of trade and agriculture? Or is it, that being a class of men peculiarly ignorant of the world and its ways, they are more easily misled and gammoned? Or is it because, having been taught at college a smattering of the ologies, they have the vanity to presume that they can make a short cut, "a royal road," to what proves so long, so arduous, so uncertain a goal, as the educated physician acknowledges his ultimatum to be, after life-long struggles and honest devotion to the truth.

The prominent defect of men, like the clergy, who have none, or only an elementary smattering in the science of medicine is this-that they insist on making a full, glorious, growing summer, of a single, solitary swallow, which they have seen, or think they have seen, or, at least, heard of; they ase unable to comprehend that a post hoc is not necessarily a propter hoc, that a sequence may not be a consequence -or, to use the well-known English saying respecting that class of logicians who couple things together as cause and effect simply because they happen about the same date, they always regard Tenterden steeple to be the undoubted cause of Godwin sands! If, perchance, they should see a patient recover after a "great medicine" of the Pottawatamies had performed his filthy orgies over him, they would never have the intrusion of one doubt that the miraculous cure resulted from the "means being blessed."

These shallow logicians never dream that the natural, spontaneous termination of nineteen-twentieths of all sickness is in recovery, and not death-that, whether treated or mal-treated, or left to the resources of the constitution, the patient may be expected to live; how much unnecessary suffering, delay and permanent mischief to the sufferer, from the omission of proper, or the administration of noxious means, being entirely a different question. When a person who is more or less sick, makes an escape, after any of the varieties of empiricism, with his life, these sagacious philosophers are ready to throw up their caps and Vol. I. No. 3.-7.

cry Eureka! Many a parson who finds his child get well, somewhere about the epoch when some new quackery has been applied, goes cackling about the parish, as if the philosopher's stone had been discovered. His intelligent parishioners-finding their pastor adopting that motto so universal, as well to deserve to be emblazoned as part of the clerical arms, "credo quia impossibile est"-begin to ask the question whether he builds his faith in the doctrines and truths of religion, which they pay him for teaching to themselves and their families, on the same psychological processes, as those in which he hangs his medical belief. The natural conclusion is, that a man who is ready to hazard the lives of his household on practices and practitioners, in respect to whose value or safety he has less evidence thau a prudent man would require of the itinerant tinker who presents himself to mend the brass kettle, is not a safe guide in matters either temporal or spiritual. Is this any explanation of the recent fact, that more than one of the clergymen of this city, who a few years since identified themselves with the now all but defunct vagaries of Hahneman, have had leave to retire to other "fields" on account of health; or is it that the same want of good common sense, which embracing this humbug would indicate, is merely an "ex pede Herculum" proof of enormous weakness and gullibility in other points of their intellectual con

stitution?

This train of thought has been suggested by reading an article in the last Christian Examiner, presumptively the production of some member of the clerical or pedagogic profession, on the water cure, as it is called. This guess is hazarded under no knowledge of its paternity, but for the reason that there is a solemn owlishness in its ex cathedra annunciation of common places about pathology-a smattering of medical ideas, such as could only be obtained from some school-girl's compend of "Physiology made Easy," or "The House I Live in"-mixed with eulogistic, self-complacent commendations, common in circulars and advertisements of "Water-cure Establishments."

Of course we have no idea of attempting a formal argument in reply to such an article, from such a source, and in such a vehicle. Nothing is more absurd than the attempt to argue down a delusion, even with an antagonist whose preliminary acquaintance with the subject matter renders it practicable to adapt reasoning to his compre

hension. The endeavor to reason on a topic of medicine with a writer like this-one who manifestly is not guilty of claiming the elementary rudiments, the very A B C of acquaintance-would be as ridiculous as it would be to labor with brother Himes, or Silas Lamson, on the intricacies of exegesis, or the philological refinements of the Coptic or Sanscrit dialects with the pious end of convincing them that they are utterly ignorant of interpretation and prophecy. It would in either case be very easy to furnish the conclusive proofs, but to furnish the recipient understanding, hic labor, hoc opus est!

Some of the ridiculous points of this aquatic evangely -its analogies to various other forms of moonshine and fraud-might perhaps be made available to some innocents of both genders, who have not read enough in the earliest books of medicine to be able to comprehend the absurdities of them in a medical point of view.

Sir Gilbert Blane long ago made the remark, doubtless verified in every intelligent person's observation, that whenever a professed curer of disease, regular or empiric, undertook to set up the claim that he lost very few or no patients, it may be safely affirmed that either he was trusted with no serious cases, or would be found to lie-under a great mistake. Our cold water lacquey, who pretends to give the returns of one of these aquatic caravanseras, will find that his vaunted success is "decidedly and individually" surpassed by the "semi-occasional" announcements of Dr. Peters, Dr. Dow, and other worthies, whose cures are made "without absence from business and with no mercury," in the daily "penny medical journals." These "bastard and unlineal sons" of "Slapslapius," in their pathetic Jeremiads to the afflicted "to beware of the advertising quack across the street," report more thousands cured without being killed, than there are hundreds under the "cautious and intelligent practitioner" [!] whose glories he celebrates, and whose veritable history and claims to confidence are foreshadowed in an official certificate of an association of his contrymen at Philadelphia, published in this Journal some months since.

Our friend Aquarius-for so bright a constellation of medical science deserves no less a persouification-has apparently got hold of some crude ideas of the ancient humoral pathology, and gravely announces the theory of the water cure to consist in washing out a goodly portion