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I had to wait for some time in the deserted library before the medical men appeared. They had the baffled manner of empirics who have been superseded by the great Healer; and I lingered only long enough to hear that Grancy was not suffering and that my presence could do him no harm. I found him seated in his arm-chair in the little study. He held out his hand with a smile.
He discussed the "efficacy" of millepedes, which he found to be "very diuretical and aperitive." And he indicated, on the evidence of a single patient whom he knew, that the millepedes had great medicinal value in suffusions of the eyes. Many remedies of this type, the so-called old wives' remedies, were those of empirics.
"Ask what questions you please," cried Margrave, impatiently, "later if I have strength left to answer them; but do not interrupt me, while I husband my force to say what alone is important to me and to you. Disappointed in the hopes I had placed in you, I resolved to repair to Paris, that great furnace of all bold ideas. I questioned learned formalists; I listened to audacious empirics.
Sufferers from protracted and apparently hopeless disorders profit little by scientific information as to the nature of their complaints, yet they listen with profound interest to the experience of fellow-sufferers, even when this experience is unprofessionally and unconnectedly told. Medical empirics understand this and profit by it.
"Notwithstanding the vaunted destruction of the ancient Hydra of superstition by the darts and javelins of modern rationalism, and the ponderous hot irons of empirics, it is undeniably true that the habit of 'seeking after a sign' survived the generation of Scribes and Pharisees whom Christ rebuked; and manifests itself in the middle of the nineteenth century by the voracity with which merely material phenomena are seized as unmistakable indications of preternatural agencies.
The host of empirics, mountebanks, and self-dubbed hygeists, which infest the metropolis, and the tinctures, cordials, pills, balms, and essences, so much extolled by their retailers, and swallowed by the public, are indeed so many proofs of the credulity of the age, that to say the least, the march of intellect has evidently made a faux-pas in this direction.
Thou wert first in my morning eyes; and of nights, hast detained my steps from bedward, till it was but a step from gazing at thee to dreaming on thee. This is the only true gentry by adoption; the veritable change of blood, and not, as empirics have fabled, by transfusion.
Men are imaginary invalids, whose weakness empirics are interested to encourage, in order to have sale for their drugs. They listen rather to the physician, who prescribes a variety of remedies, than to him, who recommends good regimen, and leaves nature to herself.
We are mere operatives, empirics, and egotists, until we learn to think in letters instead of figures. They all stared. There is a divinity student lately come among us to whom I commonly address remarks like the above, allowing him to take a certain share in the conversation, so far as assent or pertinent questions are involved.
Add to the former reasons, the bold and confident brags, and promises of Empirics, that they have cured worse diseases, and will in few hours free them from their maladies, especially where sober Physicians have pronounced doubtfully of the event.
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