Unlike again those savants who, innocently believing that they no longer have anything to learn and that they are always right, listen to themselves talk during a discussion instead op listening to their interlocutor, Bonnet listened to the latter with sympathy and curiosity. This surgeon was, to use M. pasteur’s expression, one of those kindlers of soul’s one of those wakeners of ideas, who call forth scientific careers. He was familiarly called the sun of Lyonnese medicine, because n he warmed the hearts and enlightened the minds. Hence at the time of his too early demise at the age of 49 years, there was among the public and the physicians a genuine outburst of regret and admiration which suggested a subscription for the erection of a statue to his memory.
Not satisfied with seeking for truths through his personal labor and in the labors of his associates. Amedee Bonnet sought for it in the practice of physicians without diplomas, as is proved by the two following facts:
By means of the use of glasses of gradually decreasing numbers a man of tennis, Henry Schlesinger, of Lissa, in Prussian Poland, had discovered, in about 1830, a means of curing asthenopia, photophobia, presbyopia, myopia, etc., His remarkable cures led the Prussian government to offer him a chair in the faculty of medicine of Berlin, where he might teach his discovery after he should have received the degree of Doctor of Medicine. while he was beginning his studies for that purpose, the Berlin physicians were divided, in reference to his case, into two parties the progressists, his partisans, and the conservatives, his adversaries. The petty annoyances of the latter compelled Schlesinger to depart, in about 1838, for France, where he practiced his specialty. In 1840 he in vain offered to the members of the Institute and the Academy of Medicine to make known his discovery to them. What respect, indeed, could they have for an oculist who had no diploma But Bonnet, who above all considered results obtained. Requested Schlesinger to practice his special in his clinics.
Some time before a professor in a medical college had had himself treated in secret be Schlesinger, who cured him of a chronic affection o the eyes., this professor took the greatest care not to make known to oculists, and especially t his own patients, whom he was treating for similar diseases of the eyes without being able to cure them. but from whom he received fat fees. I learned this at my cost, having been cured by Schlesinger after the professor had failed in my own case. Being conformed of this fact Bonnet cried out with indignation, as he shrugged his high and broad shoulders: I do not understand how one can fail encourage to uphold one’s opinion. He might have added. And sufficient honesty to act, first of all, in the interest of the patients who come to ask us to cure what means.,
At another time Bonnet, who had an insatiable love for truth and progress and was no respecter of persons, did better. still. He did not feat to lower himself by descending from his chair of clinical surgery to examine the practice or Gren and, a celebrated bonesetter of Lyons. He found there massage, whose application he popularized in regular medicine-that, passage with which military surgery cures sprains, they say, three times more rapidly than by means of the old classical medication.
In France, as in other country of Europe, law grants the right or treating the sick only to those physicians who have received diplomas from Stage institutional; and yet, outside or the teaching of the faculties of these institutions, there are many very efficacious methods of medication that are unknown to such faculties. Among others, I shall briefly mention the three following classes of medication.
1st. Homoeopathic medication, whose superiority over allopathic medication is demonstrated bee its scientific character and by numerous official statistics
2nd. What is popularly called old women’s remedies, and consisting of divers methods used more than a century ago by physicians and forgotten by their successors, but faithfully kept in popular tradition.
3rd. divers medicates discovered and used empirically. To this second category of these medications belong, among other, the two following:
A villager who is subject to nephritic colic tells me that when he feels its premonitory symptoms, he gets rid of the renal calculi by drinking a tea made with eight or ten wild rose berries.
A lady, by administering, morning and evening, an infusion of the dry;leaves and flowers of Golden rod ( Solidago Virga Aurea) tells me that she cured her husband of an affection of the balder which had compelled him to use a catheter for a year or more. A friend of homoeopathy, not a physician, desired to est the efficaciousness of this plant. He caused the first dilutions of its tincture to be taken three times a day by seven patients of from forty-two to seventy four years of age, who had been obliged to catheterize themselves for weeks, months and years and cured them so thoroughly that they had no relapses. Surgeons who spend much time and skill in catheterizing such patients for months and years could often acre them such more rapidly by prescribing for them the remedy just mentioned. But they disdain these remedies, proved valuable by popular tradition, and thus make the fortune of the quack who uses them.
To the third category of these medications belongs the following:
All the vegetable remedies of America. which are being used more and more and the physicians of all schools, were first discovered and used empirically by the Indians of that country
