Note 18 — Chapter VI · HOMŒOPATHY.[14]

In the Domestic Physician, intended as a guide for families who practice Homœopathy, this same Dr. Hering, who has adorned the book with an engraving of himself represented as learnedly poring over some work, (I presume one of that same 15 octavo volumes,) thus discourses of physicians, under the head of Effects of Mercury. “This is the universal elixir of the quacks in all diseases—who, whilst they pretend to restore their patients to health, destroy their constitution. They administer it as calomel in powders, or dissolved as corrosive sublimate, or in pills—those abominable blue pills.” And then, “that no one may be deceived, at least not those for whom a physician prescribes,” he goes on to give the different Latin names of these preparations of mercury, as they are written in the prescriptions of physicians, or quacks, as he so modestly calls them: This is a little impudent in one who prescribes as remedies, and in this very book, two preparations of mercury, and one of them the most powerful of all, corrosive sublimate, made more powerful too, according to his theory, by the ‘dynamic power’ imparted to it by Homœopathic subdivision and trituration.