H. M. to H. G. A.

You say it would be an extremely interesting question whether one disease may not be made to drive out another. Do you mean by this anything different from the ordinary medical practice of our time? I take it, this is the whole secret of medical practice,—the secret of giving calomel, and all the other horrible drugs by which doctors are wont “to set up one disease to drive out another,” as they say. In this matter, my sympathies are wholly with the Homœopathists, who prefer following nature, and helping the actual disease out of the system, to driving it out by the introduction of another. Bnt one wonders that the doctors have not got on,—such facts as they have had before their eyes,—from daily causing a more manageable disease to drive out a less manageable one, to trying whether a healthy person cannot take upon himself the malady of the sick,—not only sharing, but relieving the evil. You or I could at the shortest notice furnish them with exemplifications of this, from our experience in mesmerizing: and whenever they will attend to it, and put the matter to proof under their own eyes, it will be a great day for the health and happiness of the human race. It is a strange thing that the facts they must daily meet do not set them looking into them.