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"THE highest, nay, the sole vocation of the medical practitioner, is to make sick men sound ;" and "the beau idéal of the healing process is an easy, quick, and lasting restoration of health, or a complete annihilation of disease in the shortest, surest, and safest method." So says Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, in the beginning of the text of his Organon ;" and certainly, if the groundwork of his system were as securely laid, and the good results of its appliance as undeniable as these preliminary axioms, he might demand the belief of the most sceptical in the history of science. To build up an universal system of medicine upon a single proposition; to make it plain to the patient by what means, and in what manner, his cure may be effected; to change the vague and obscure terms of art into a catalogue of distinct and intelligible symptoms; and last, not least, to convert the odious operation of taking physic into the simple and not inelegant diversion of swallowing a few tiny pellets of tinctured sugar-to the utter ex

tinction of all draughts, pills, and boluses, and extreme disgrace and discomfort of apothecaries—these are the clashing innovations on the therapeutic art assayed by Dr. Hahnemann; and this is the character of that doctrine of Homöopathie, which for the last twenty years has caused no little sensation among our Teutonic neighbours, though its very name has as yet scarcely penetrated into our insular regions. Be the doctrines of Hahnemann, therefore, true as they are pleasing, or false as they are startling by their novelty, it is time that they should be made known to the British public, and submitted to the keen and sagacious criticism of our own medical school. Such is the main object of this article; for we are not by any means to be understood as advocating these doctrines, though we should sometimes, for the sake of a more lively statement of them, use the language of the Homöopathists. True or false, Homöopathie is at least not to be confounded with empiricism. It has some of the outward signs, but it has none of the inward and essential

characteristics of quackery. It is not a resource and refuge for ignorance; but requires extensive knowledge, as well as great experience, in the physician who would practise according to its rules ;-a varied and extensive knowledge of the parts and functions of the human frame; of pathology, too, as well as physiology; of botany and chemistry, and the practical uses of both.