of three hundred cases of pneumonia, two hundred and twenty-four cases of pleurisy, and one hundred and five cases of peritonitis (in all six hundred and twenty-nine cases), spread over a period of eight years, all the cases, except the fatal ones (twenty-seven in number), were slight, and such as would have seemed to us hardly requiring treatment of any kind. In fact, according to all experience, such could not be the case. But, independently of this a priori argument, we have sufficient evidence to prove that many of the cases of pneumonia, at least, were severe cases. A few of these cases are reported in detail by Dr Fleischmann himself, and we have ourselves had the statement corroborated by the private testimony of a physician (not a Homœopath), who attended Dr Fleischmann's wards for three months. This gentleman watched the course of several cases of pneumonia, and traced their progress by the physical signs, through the different stages of congestion, hepatization, and resolution, up to a perfect cure, within a period of time which would have appeared short under the most energetic treatment of Allopathy."— P. 243.

Again, in reference to the cases published in my treatise, you say of two "well-marked cases of acute rheumatism," and two of "severe neuralgia,” that "it would be unfair to deny that the result obtained in these four last cases would have been regarded as very satisfactory under any mode of Allopathic treatment," p. 245; and of the cases generally, "we do not hesitate to declare that the amount of success obtained by Dr Henderson in the treatment of his cases would have been considered by ourselves as very satisfactory, had we been treating the same cases according to the rules of ordinary practice."-P. 250.

Now, all these admissions have the appearance of fairness, and considering the manner in which the facts both of Fleischmann and myself have been misrepresented by uncandid reviewers, they will seem startling and extreme

to most of your professional readers. Yet they are fair only in a degree-only to the level of your hypothesis regarding the power of nature, and far short of the truth. A greater amount of success than the old system you will not admit Homœopathy to procure; you allow it to run neck and neck with the former in the treatment of some of the most dangerous inflammations even, but not a hair's breadth It must not pass the line of your preconceptions, let the "hard words, and harder figures of statistical tables" say what they may.

more.

But the subject is far too important to be slurred over in a way so summary and inaccurate, and I therefore hope you will excuse me if I keep somewhat closer to the facts than your hypothesis finds it convenient to do. To get rid of the overwhelming evidence of the superiority of the Homœopathic practice, as shown on a comparison of Dr Fleischmann's tables with similar tables of Allopathic physicians, you object to all the statistical tables that profess to exhibit the comparative results of treatment of any kind. The genius of the diseases at different seasons, the influence of the sex, age, and condition of the patients, are so many circumstances that seem to you to deprive the statistics, hitherto published, of value in such a comparison. And you are right to this extent, that we have as yet no statistical details sufficiently minute, or so carefully classified, as to enable us to determine to a fraction what is the amount of superiority which one kind of treatment possesses over another. But a degree of precision such as this is not necessary in the inquiry we have in hand. We want to know, simply, on which side, the Homœopathic or the Allopathic, the advantage lies, and not the exact amount of the advantage. And to settle this point there is an ample accumulation of sufficiently minute information to leave no room for doubt respecting it. In large collections of cases of any disease, the sex, age, and condition of the patient, and the date of the disease when brought un

der treatment, become so much equalised, that there is no danger, in comparing them, of drawing an erroneous inference as to the general fact of which group has been the most successfully treated-which treatment has been, on the whole, the best, and the most worthy of future confidence.

I conceive that no one will be inclined to dispute that three or four hundred cases of a particular disease, on each side, taken indiscriminately from both sexes, at all ages above infancy, at all periods of the disease, according as the persons affected happened to present themselves for treatment, at all seasons, and during a series of years, present very fair grounds for ascertaining the comparative value of two kinds of practice. It is in the very nature of statistics, collected in such circumstances, and embracing so large a number of cases, to do away with accidental sources of error, and to bring out a general fact that might be misrepresented by more limited data. The comparisons I am about to give possess all these safeguards against mistake, and the proofs which they afford are as completely decisive in respect to the general fact of the superiority of the Homœopathic practice as any proofs we have in medicine on any point whatever.

Dr Fleischmann treated in the Homœopathic Hospital of Vienna during the nine years beginning in 1834, and ending in 1843, two hundred and ninety-nine cases of inflammation of the lungs. Of these nineteen died, or about one in sixteen.

With these cases I contrast, first, the experience of Chomel in the Hotel Dieu of Paris. He does not, in the account from which my information is drawn, specify the number of cases that had fallen under his care; but when we consider the frequency of pneumonia in Paris, the size of the hospital in which he practised, and the length of time to which the account refers, we must admit that the number cannot have been less than that treated by Fleisch

mann. The period of ten years, from 1832 to 1842, during which Chomel's cases occurred, will be allowed to have been sufficiently extensive to have prevented any possibility of error from the variable genius of the disease, coinciding so nearly as it does, too, with the period of Fleischmann's practice. And in order to do away with the possibility of any prejudice to the comparison, in favour of Homœopathy, that might be conjectured to arise from the cases of Fleischmann having been accidentally of an age more favourable to recovery than those of Chomel, I select from the statements of the latter what he says of the mortality during that period of adult life, when the average success is the greatest, and contrast this with the results of Fleischmann's practice among persons of all ages. It appears, then, that between the ages of twenty and forty, Chomel had a mortality of one in eight, or double that of Dr Fleischmann at all ages. The Homœopathic physician does not mention the ages of his patients; but the table he has given proves that his hospital is, like other general hospitals, devoted to the reception of all kinds of disease; and, judging from the nature of the diseases he specifies in his table, it is clear that the persons admitted were mostly past the period of adolescence. Thus, of the diseases the most common in early youthscarlet fever, measles, hooping cough, convulsions, general scrofula, varicella-only one hundred and eighty-seven cases were admitted in the nine years, while the whole number of patients was six thousand three hundred and twenty-two.

Again, if we compare the mortality of pneumonia under the ordinary treatment, within limits of age still more favourable to recovery (for you know that the mortality is less as the age is earlier that of early infancy excepted), we still find it greater than that of Fleischmann at all ages. Barthez and Rilliet give us one hundred and sixteen cases between the ages of sixteen and thirty, and

Leroux* one hundred and eighty-two cases between the ages of thirteen and thirty, including a period of seventeen years, in which the mortality is at the lowest, after the age of puberty, in the ordinary practice; and thus we have almost exactly the same number of cases as Fleischmann adduces, and collected, too, in various years and seasons. The mortality was more than one in twelve, or one-fourth greater than that of the Homoeopathic practice. All that can be said or imagined, by any experienced and reflecting person, of the sources of fallacy in statistics, cannot subvert the conclusion from these facts-that the Homœopathic treatment of inflammation of the lungs is vastly superior to the ordinary treatment. The exact amount of its superiority may not be such as these facts represent; it may be greater or it may be less, but that is of no consequence to the present inquiry. What we want to determine, I repeat, is simply which practice is the most successful, and not the precise amount of the difference; and yet it is only to this latter, and, in a practical point of view, altogether secondary and insignificant consideration, that your objections to statistics actually apply.

What makes the comparisons I have made still more important and conclusive is, that the mortality of pneumonia increases after the age of forty, so that from forty to sixty, during Chomel's ten years, it was one in five; and above sixty, one in two. This progressive increase in the mortality with increasing years, appears, according to M. Grisolle, the most learned writer on the subject, "to be the same in all countries, in hospitals as well as in private practice.”—P. 520. And yet, with all the disadvantage of a comparison of cases, in which a portion must have belonged to periods of life at which pneumonia increases in danger and severity, with others drawn from a period when it shows much less of a dangerous tendency, the suc

* Grisolle.