Excerpt from Atlanta Medical and Surgical Journal, 1856, Vol. 1

It is difficult to find a period at which quackery in medicine may be said to have had a commencement. Human nature, since the tall, has been corrupt; and man has continually, from that period, been disposed to seek out, many devices by which to avoid the fulfilment of the Divine decree, that, By the sweat of the brow man should live. And in no age of the world have there been wanting 111dividuals, too scrupulous, to take advantage of opportunities for realizing a subsistence without being very particular to enquire as to the legitimacy of the means; in none of the departments of active life has this dis position been more decidedly manifested than in ourown calling. Nvhile from the earliest times, there have been individuals who have pursued the investigation of disease with honest and phil anthmpic purposes, a large number have always been found looking alone to the accumulation of wealth and attainment of position, by practising upon the ignorance and credulity of the world.

The fondness for mystwy upon the part of the votaries of medicine, and the willingness upon the' part of the world to be deceived, perhaps, commenced with Esculapius (to whom was ascribed the power of raising the dead, and who was worshipped as the God of Medicine) and has descended in no small degree down to our own times. If, the temples which the ancients were wont to raise to him, and in which votive tablets were hung up, on which were recorded the diseases cured, as they imagined, by his assistance, are no longer erected to our modern Gods, they are able, at least, to record their own deeds, and to raise temples and palaces for themselves from the rich otter. Ings which flow from a perpetuation of the same credulity and ignorance, and doubtless, in this age of the world, can divini tics prefer the wealth and luxury heaped upon them to all the honors which the ancients awarded to aesculapius.

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