Medical Essays, 1842-1882 by Oliver Wendell Holmes
page 12 of 423 (02%)
page 12 of 423 (02%)
|
This paper was written in a great heat and with passionate indignation.
If I touched it at all I might trim its rhetorical exuberance, but I prefer to leave it all its original strength of expression. I could not, if I had tried, have disguised the feelings with which I regarded the attempt to put out of sight the frightful facts which I brought forward and the necessary conclusions to which they led. Of course the whole matter has been looked at in a new point of view since the microbe as a vehicle of contagion has been brought into light, and explained the mechanism of that which was plain enough as a fact to all who were not blind or who did not shut their eyes. O. W. H. BEVERLY Farms, Mass., August 3, 1891 HOMOEOPATHY AND ITS KINDRED DELUSIONS [Two lectures delivered before the Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. 1842.] [When a physician attempts to convince a person, who has fallen into the Homoeopathic delusion, of the emptiness of its pretensions, he is often answered by a statement of cases in which its practitioners are thought to have effected wonderful cures. The main object of the first of these Lectures is to show, by abundant facts, that such statements, made by persons unacquainted with the fluctuations of disease and the fallacies of observation, are to be considered in general as of little or no value |
|