But how should they know that it is good?
That is the mystery to me. I am always agreeably disappointed;
it is incredible that they should have found it out. Since all
things are good, men fail at last to distinguish which is the
bane, and which the antidote. There are sure to be two
prescriptions diametrically opposite. Stuff a cold and starve a
cold are but two ways. They are the two practices both always in
full blast. Yet you must take advice of the one school as if
there was no other. In respect to religion and the healing art,
all nations are still in a state of barbarism. In the most
civilized countries the priest is still but a Powwow, and the
physician a Great Medicine. Consider the deference which is
everywhere paid to a doctor's opinion. Nothing more strikingly
betrays the credulity of mankind than medicine. Quackery is a
thing universal, and universally successful. In this case it
becomes literally true that no imposition is too great for the
credulity of men. Priests and physicians should never look one
another in the face. They have no common ground, nor is there
any to mediate between them. When the one comes, the other goes.
They could not come together without laughter, or a significant
silence, for the one's profession is a satire on the other's, and
either's success would be the other's failure.
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