“There has been a great increase of medical men of late, but, upon my life, diseases have increased in proportion.”—John Abernethy, M.D., “The Good,” of London.
“Gentlemen, ninety-nine out of every hundred medical facts are medical lies; and medical doctrines are, for the most part, stark, staring nonsense.”—Prof. Gregory, of Edinburgh, author of a work on “Theory and Practice of Physic.”
“It cannot be denied that the present system of medicine is a burning shame to its professors, if indeed a series of vague and uncertain incongruities deserves to be called by that name. How rarely do our medicines do good! How often do they make our patients really worse! I fearlessly assert, that in most cases the sufferer would be safer without a physician than with one. I have seen enough of the mal-practice of my professional brethren to warrant the strong language I employ.”—Dr. Ramage, Fellow of the Royal College, London.
“The present practice of medicine is a reproach to the name of Science, while its professors give evidence of an almost total ignorance of the nature and proper treatment of disease. Nine times out of ten, our miscalled remedies are absolutely injurious to our patients, suffering under diseases of whose real character and cause we are most culpably ignorant.”—Prof. Jameison, of Edinburgh.
Assuredly the uncertain and most unsatisfactory art that we call medical science, is no science at all, but a jumble of inconsistent opinions; of conclusions hastily and often incorrectly drawn; of facts misunderstood or perverted; of comparisons without analogy; of hypotheses without reason, and theories not only useless, but dangerous.”—Dublin Medical Journal.
“Some patients get well with the aid of medicine; more without it; and still more in spite of it.”—Sir John Forbes, M.D., F.R.S. “Thousands are annually slaughtered in the quiet of the sick-room. Governments should at once either banish medical men, and proscribe their blundering art, or they should adopt some better means to protect the lives of the people than at present prevail, when they look far less after the practice of this dangerous profession, and the murders committed in it, than after the lowest trades.”—Dr. Frank, an eminent author and practitioner.
“Our actual information or knowledge of disease does not increase in proportion to our experimental practice. Every dose of medicine given is a blind experiment upon the vitality of the patient.”—Dr. Bostock, author of “History of Medicine.”
“The science of medicine is a barbarous jargon, and the effects of our medicines on the human system in the highest degree uncertain; except, indeed, that they have destroyed more lives than war, pestilence, and famine combined.”—John Mason Good, M.D., F.R.S., author of “Book of Nature,” “A System of Nosology,” “Study of Medicine,” etc.
“I declare as my conscientious conviction, founded on long experience and reflection, that if there were not a single physician, surgeon, man midwife, chemist, apothecary, druggist, nor drug on the face of the earth, there would be less sickness and less mortality than now prevail.”—Jas. Johnson, M.D., F.R.S., Editor of the Medico-Chirurgical Review.
So it comes to this, that during three thousand years remedies have been accumulating until between two and three thousand drugs are recorded in the archives of the medical profession, and yet we have the admission of some of the highest authorities on the subject that the nature of disease is still a mystery, that the “modus operandi” of drugs is equally obscure, and that in consequence there is profound uncertainty as to the relation of drugs to the diseases for which they are prescribed.