Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/774

754 in all ages and with all schools of medicine. I claim that by the rigid following out of the principles here taught it will be possible for even the humblest member of the profession to take any new remedy, and, if a sufficient number of cases be provided, to accurately determine some points at least of its therapeutic value, if it really possesses any that are capable of being demonstrated to the senses or reason of man. It is the unconscious or unformulated apprehension of these errors in the working up of remedies that causes so many of the profession to take at certain periods of their lives the extreme and unscientific view that all medication is a mistake—that drugs have no power outside of the mind of the one who takes them—and consequently, and logically, to trust only to the forces of nature and hygiene.

In relation to this branch of our theme, it is worthy of note that there are certain modes of treating disease which from the very nature and manner of their employment can not be experimented with in a truly scientific way; it is impossible to use them so as to deceive the patient on whom they are used; of necessity, therefore, they must be developed by the process of successive eliminations already described. Among the medical procedures of this class are hydro-therapeutics or hydropathy, electro-therapeutics, and massage, or systematized rubbing, kneading, and manipulation; none of these remedial operations can be used without the patient's knowledge; none of them can be used in a different way from what the patient supposes they are being used; they are open, in clear sight, and affect the various senses so strikingly that satisfactory deception is impossible; patients know when they are being galvanized or faradized; they know when they are washed or showered; they know when they are rubbed and kneaded; no art or device of the physician can avail to so deceive them as to absolutely eliminate the error that comes from the hope or fear or expectation of what the treatment is to accomplish. The practical value of these methods of treatment—and they are all of undoubted value—could only be ascertained, as it has been ascertained, by the immense variety of the experiments that have been made with them, wherein through the process of time the six sources of error have been little by little eliminated.

In all new remedies and systems of treatment the aim of the scientific physician should be to make the deception so thorough that whatever effects are obtained must be known positively to be the objective action of the treatment or of nature. The criticism which I make on Burq, Charcot, and others, who have recently experimented with the action of metals of different kinds on the anæsthesia of hysterical patients, is that they left the question open when, by a systematic, orderly, and thorough provision against these six sources of error, they had it in their power, with the vast material at their command, to have absolutely closed it; if they could not determine with certainty whether the temporary disappearance of the anæsthesia on the application of