"Indeed, it can be easily proved that the best philosophers and chemists fail more frequently in the performance of their projected experiments, than do the well instructed and faithful Physio-Medical practitioners in the cure of disease.
"The conditions of their experiments being right, and the operators intelligent and skillful, both classes of operations are certain to produce the expected results. But sometimes the instrument or agent or both are defective, and then the results in neither case can succeed. The chemist can do nothing if his instruments are imperfect or his agents impure. So the physician can not cure a far gone case of tuberculosis with any medicine, nor any disease with inert substances.
"It is wonderful and a most astounding fact, that such a man as Samuel Thomson should have prescribed a hundred different remedies for the elimination of disease (many of which had never before been used), and yet among them all is not found a single deadly poison, nor even a dangerous substance.
THE MEDICINES OF NATURE 25
"The simplicity of the Physio-Medical practice has been an objection to its universal application. It should be its greatest recommendation.
"The beauty and excellence of all science consists in its ability to reduce confusion to order, to extract philosophy from mystery, and to bring all the operations of art within the comprehension of the ordinary mind.
"The human body is supported and health sustained by the orderly process of digestion, circulation and disposition of a few organized substances, composed chiefly of carbon, oxygen hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, lime and other organic mineral elements. All the motions of all the organs are produced by the simple contraction and relaxation of their constituent fibres.
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