tain drugs that will act as an emetic or cathartic; but if the patient should take an emetic by accident, it would make him vomit. Now when the patient vomits, if a wrong direction is given, another effect might be produced; so it all goes to show that the mind must be guided by some wisdom superior to itself. If error directs, nothing certain is known of the effect. If wisdom is at the helm no medicine is wanted, for Wisdom can break opinions in pieces.
Ignorance not knowing how the mind can be affected by a direction outside of itself, identifies wisdom with error or matter, so that truth is a stranger, and it is all the time fighting against itself to get rid of an enemy of its own creation. Now teach men this simple fact, that in all action the wisdom of reaction is in the act though the act knows it not, and their happiness will be the result.
IS THERE ANY CURATIVE QUALITY IN MEDICINE?
Common opinion would answer that there is and according to my opinion there is but it is all owing to the patient's belief, and to perfect wisdom there is no curative virtue in medicine.
I will relate one case out of a hundred to show medicine proves itself according to the patient's belief or the direction of some other person. I was attending a gentleman who was sick and he thought he had consumption, but was not fully settled in his own mind, so of course he was very nervous. Under this nervousness the glands around the throat were excited and kept him hacking and raising, and also kept him heated, which heat would be thrown off in a perspiration. After I had told him the cause of his trouble, the explanation so far as he understood relieved him, he breathed more easily and was improving. One day he read in a paper an advertisement of a medicine which would cure the catarrh and prevent the discharges from the head; thinking it might cure him he bought a bottle and commenced taking it, but instead of lessening the secretion it grew worse and he ran down very rapidly.
My theory explains this fact in this way. His belief admitted that his head was diseased and in the condition of a sore and that the medicine would cure it. Under this belief the glands of the nose were excited and the medicine then proved his belief that the matter was in his head, for it was taken to make the head discharge. His belief did this by exciting the glands and the medicine was taken to throw it off,
