A few years ago, a certain Doctor Hugh Martin, a surgeon of one of the Pennsylvania regiments stationed at Pittsburg, during the latter part of the late war, came to this city, and advertised to cure cancers with a medicine which he said he had discovered in the woods, in the neighbourhood of the garrison. As Dr. Martin had once been my pupil, I took the liberty of waiting upon him, and asked him some questions respecting his discovery. His answers were calculated to make me believe, that his medicine was of a vegetable nature, and that it was originally an Indian remedy. He showed me some of the medicine, which appeared to be the powder of a well-dried root of some kind. Anxious to see the success of this medicine in cancerous sores, I prevailed upon the doctor to admit me to see him apply it in two or three cases. I observed, in some instances, he applied a powder to the parts affected, and in others only touched them with a feather dipped in a liquid which had a white sediment, and which he made me believe was the vegetable root diffused in water. It gave me great pleasure to witness the efficacy of the doctor's applications. In several cancerous ulcers, the cures he performed were complete. Where the cancers were much connected with the lymphatic system, or accompanied with a scrophulous habit of body, his medicine always failed, and, in some instances, did evident mischief.
Anxious to discover a medicine that promised relief in even a few cases of cancers, and supposing that all the caustic vegetables were nearly alike, I applied the phytolacca or poke-root, the stramonium, the arum, and one or two others, to foul ulcers, in hopes of seeing the same effects from them which I had seen from Doctor Martin's powder; but in these I was disappointed. They gave some pain, but performed no cures. At length I was furnished by a gentleman from Pittsburg with a powder which I had no doubt, from a variety of circumstances, was of the same kind as that used by Dr. Martin. I applied it to a fungous ulcer, but without producing the degrees of pain, inflammation, or discharge, which I had been accustomed to see from the application of Dr. Martin's powder. After this, I should have suspected that the powder was not a _simple_ root, had not the doctor continued upon all occasions to assure me, that it was wholly a vegetable preparation.