PARSONS AND DOCTORS.
Many surgeons, doubtless, remarked an absurd letter from a clergyman which appeared the other day in the Times, recommending charcoal in combination with brandy and opium—as a cure for cholera. One of them, dating his letter from Bloomsbury Square, has fortunately written an answer to that communication, pointing out that the quantity of the last-named drug prescribed by the parson would amount to 10 or 12 grains every half-hour; and of course destroy the patient. This clergyman, no doubt, is a well-meaning person, but he should confine himself to pointing the way to Heaven, recollecting that the opposite place is paved with good intentions. Possibly he overstated the quantity of opium, by what may be called a clerical error; a proper dose of it is well known to be beneficial in the complaint in question: brandy is also found useful: and to these two ingredients of the mixture we should be disposed to ascribe any favourable result of its administration. The third is probably inert; otherwise it would be a convenient medicine, as anybody, in case of need, might munch cinders.
Clergymen, in their anxiety to do good, are too often accustomed to add the treatment of bodies to the cure of souls. In order to minister to patients as well as penitents, they ought to possess the gift of healing, and that having ceased to be supernaturally imparted, they had better acquire it in the ordinary manner, by attending the hospitals. Some add homœopathy to what the rubric prescribes in the Visitation of the Sick, and by so doing do the least harm that it is possible to do by empiricism; as the swallowers of their globules at least die of their diseases: but we would advise even the homœopathic divines to stick to theological mysticism, and not deal in "riddles" which will generally be "affairs of death."