Note 6 — PREFACE.

Legislative passiveness towards scientific medicine is not the only evil we have to complain of. Surely, in selling Letters Patent for the protection of quack-medicines—in seeming to sanction and authenticate whatever lies their proprietor may post upon the wall, the State demeans itself into complicity with fraud, and soils its fingers with something fouler than the Vespasian tax. It illustrates the curious forgetfulness shewn towards medicine by the Legislature, that this immoral practice of giving patents for pretended cures of disease should have been allowed to continue—as of course it must have continued, solely by oversight, till past the middle of the nineteenth century.