The idea of medicine is something to correct or relieve bodily conditions, and this theory, for it is never anything but a theory, has furnished fertile soil of the exploitation of humanity from time immemorial to the very present day.

If the ailments of humanity could be reached in this way what incentive would there be to live correctly?

It matters nothing that there is no agreement in medicine on the proper remedies for any single condition, the nearest approach to uniformity in opinion or prescribing being, perhaps, mercurials, iodides and arsenical preparations in syphilis, quinine in malaria, and sulphur in scabies, but even here there is wide divergence of opinion on the subject of these remedies and their relative or collective value.

Sir William Osier said that he could count on the fingers of one hand without repeating, all of the so-called remedies that are of any use to the human race, and his selection of the five would not suit others who would pin their faith to another five.

It would be ludicrous, if it were not pathetic, to see the implicit faith attached to the efficacy of remedies, not alone among the laity but among physicians themselves, when we consider the completely chaotic condition of drug therapeutics today.

The writer meets in consultation many men who prescribe their remedies with what semblance of confidence a reasoning being would attach to some definite procedure in mechanics, and it strains the credulity for him to believe that after these years of utter failure of drug medication these men can actually believe that it makes any vital difference at all what remedies are used in any condition.

Each one of these men, when questioned as to just what he expects his proposed drug medication to do, quickly waives the point and no longer insists on this line.

The treatment of disease by means of remedies has not one suggestion of foundation except the innate desire of the human to secure vicariously relief from his debts to Nature, and this desire is still innate, and on it and its accompanying faith is built the entire structure of medicine today.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes said many years ago that if all the medicines in the world were cast into the sea it would be so much the better for humanity and so much the worse for the fishes, and he was not so very far wrong at that.

Sir William Osier quoted the immortal Voltaire as saying that "We put medicines of which we know little into bodies about which we know less to cure disease of which we know nothing at all."

Surely if drugs were of unquestioned value in the treatment of disease there would be something like a standard of treatment for each familiar disease, yet if we consult one hundred different men we will get eighty-seven different ideas of our condition and not less than ninety-seven different plans of treatment, showing that there must be the haziest of ideas on both disease and its means of treatment.

From the days of the witches' broth to the present every conceivable thing that is mineral, vegetable, or animal has been used for the relief of pain and disease, with the idea of cure, yet which of these remedies has persisted?

The present shows a tendency to pull away from these remedies, and other means are sought instead, such as spinal adjustments or the various electric modalities, but in acute troubles the call usually goes out to the regular physician, who feels that if he has not prescribed a drug remedy in some form he has not earned his fee. The Patient usually feels the same way about it.

That drugs do greatly modify the course of disease there is no doubt, but that they improve on the methods of Nature there is more than a grave doubt, in fact there is little doubt that every drug administered that in any way modifies the course of the symptoms is a distinct handicap to the body in correcting the condition at fault.

Drugs will relieve pain by obtunding sensation, they will move the bowels through irritation, they will cause perspiration through stimulation of the skin, they will increase the output of water through the kidneys, but not the excrementitious material that should find its way out through this channel; they will cause vomiting, or sedate an irritable stomach; all these things they will do because they impose a task of other character on which the body concentrates its eliminative energies; but to cure, to improve conditions in the slightest degree, there is not one scintilla of evidence favorable to the idea.

And yet this idea still persists of a cure by means of drugs or serums for the ills of the body, and human nature still adheres to its belief in vicarious remedies for its self-created ills.

If the layman would forever realize that his ills are all of them self-created, and start in at once to prevent these, he would soon lose his respect for drug remedies.

Not many years ago Bernarr McFadden interested a member of the staff of a prominent newspaper in securing proof that there is no uniformity in either diagnosis or prescription for disease, and had this young man accompany a member of his staff to the offices of eleven different physicians, not the little fellows but the big men who enjoyed the reputation of being among the city's best prescribers.

The test patient was selected from the staff of Physical Culture Magazine, and while there was nothing radically wrong with the young man, yet he was not very robust looking, and was furnished with a common train of symptoms that he was to detail to each prescriber.

He got eleven different opinions as to what ailed him, and eleven widely different prescriptions for the supposed trouble, which were compared afterward and found to represent as many different aims.

The reporter dared not publish the findings in this case, as the physicians were too prominent in medical circles there, but if he was a thinking sort of young man it must have caused him to lose whatever faith he had previously had in medicine.