For January 7, 1871, In An Able Editorial, Entitled " The Realm Of The Quack," Makes The Following Remarks

" Never anywhere in the field of human studies can we find more striking illustrations of the dangers and the evils of ignorance than in the history of that science whose votaries we are. Nothing so touches the human heart, nothing so puts to its utmost strain each faculty of our being, as the love of life, the fear of death, the dread of pain. These are the all-powerful and universal motives to which in every age the true and the false physician appeal.

" The true physician seeks to allay unnecessary and un-philosophical terror, to soothe with utmost promptness the suffering he witnesses, to instil a calm resignation to the universal law of death, to defer that inevitable close of the career by wise and temperate precautions, and to defend the public from the approach of pain. To accomplish this, the master-minds of all ages are agreed that the most effective means is the diffusion of sound knowledge. Socrates was not the first to proclaim that the source of physical and moral evil is ignorance. And what he advanced and proved with Bach inexhaustible subtlety of logic and profuseness of illustration, has become the watchword of civilization and the hope of the race.

" The battle we have to fight is against the powers of intellectual darkness; and the history of each day adds another to the long register of facts that proves that in our science, a? in all others, those who know the most are the leaders and the true benefactors of their race.

"A strong illustration of this axiom is found in the history of charlatanism. Within the last score of years we have seen it dispossessed of one after another of its strongholds by the careful study of them by able and conscientious observers. Hysterical phenomena, long the peculiar province of miracle vendors, are now too well known to allow them any further chance for their bold assumptions. The diseases of women, which twenty years ago was in its twilight period, is now a branch of medical science abounding in distinguished masters, and its most important facts, those which it is well for all to know, have been laid before the public in popular works of the highest order of merit, and which will prevent thousands from unwittingly violating the laws of their organization.

"There is still one department which remains far too largely in the hands of those who delight to play upon human suffering, and to foster it for their mercenary ends. Secret diseases have largely passed out of their hands, but they still thrive upon certain complaints which a native shame disinclines the patient to reveal to his family physician.

"The same is also true in England. In a recent number of one of the leading medical weeklies there, after remarking that quacks only thrive in that part of medicine which is neglected by the faculty,' it adds, ' hence, since there have been such able writers on syphilis in this country, that field has been abandoned by these dangerous charlatans. The only field left now for the quacks is that of spermatorrhoea and the functional diseases of males. The Obstetrical Society has attacked the diseases of our sisters in such a positive spirit, that the outsider has no chance in that department. That there are plenty of diseases of the male reproductive organs besides gonorrhoea and syphilis well-educated medical men know, but there is a wonderful disinclination to taking up this question. We have a few honorable exceptions in the names of Curling, Erichsen, and more recently Waring, Curran, and Teevan, but the exception proves the rule that the subject is still in the twilight epoch, and hence fit to be seized on by charlatans. Let us hope that our best young men may soon clear away the silly mysteries about this branch.'

"We echo that hope for this side of the Atlantic, and extend to it the wish that some skilled writer would dispel a little of the dense popular ignorance around these subjects, an ignorance which, shared as it is by parents, teachers, and professors, prevents them from giving instructions to their sons and pupils by which the latter could be saved from incalculable pain, mental agony, and vice. Every physician and most teachers must have witnessed repeated examples of the need of just such information."