attended the Medical College at Albany, N. Y., devoting a large portion of
my time to dissecting. After finishing at Albany, I visited various places
in western and central Massachusetts, and operated on eyes for strabismus
or cross-eyes,--an operation which had then been recently introduced for
that deformity; after which I settled at Chesterfield (Mass.), and
commenced practicing medicine, where I remained about one year.

One day I visited Northampton, and, calling on a physician with whom I was
acquainted, I found upon his table a homoeopathic book. "Why," I exclaimed
with astonishment, "you are not studying homoeopathy, are you?" "Yes," he
replied, "I am studying it, and trying the remedies cautiously;" and he
went on to describe cases which he had treated satisfactorily by the use of
the remedies, and among them a case of pleurisy and one of intermittent
fever, and he wound up by saying: "Now, if you will go down the street to a
book-store and purchase 'Hull's Jahr,' in two volumes, I will give you half
a dozen homoeopathic remedies, and you can try them for yourself."

Here was a dilemma. Never until that hour had I ever heard homoeopathy
spoken of, by either a medical professor or one of my professional
brethren, except with contempt and ridicule. "But," I said to myself, "if
there is any truth in homoeopathy I ought to know it, and I cannot treat
this physician's testimony with contempt; and it is a duty which I owe to
my fellow-men, and especially to my patients, to investigate the new system
carefully." I immediately went and purchased the books, and he give me six
bottles of medicine, and I took them back with me to Chesterfield. I
remember making but one Homoeopathic prescription before leaving
Chesterfield, and that was for a case of uterine hemorrhage, which I had
treated unsuccessfully for some time with allopathic remedies. I looked
over my Homoeopathic books carefully and found that China (cinchona) was
indicated. As that remedy was not among the bottles of medicated pellets