Our readers may think this a jest; but it is actually the point at which, on the part of the Allopathists, the controversy has arrived. A very intelligent and intelligible paper by Dr C. Radclyffe Hall, of Torquay, has appeared in the _Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal_, in which the subject is treated in a pleasant and profitable way. He is aware of the difficulty there will be in introducing the new system--of the surprised stare with which the patient will regard the doctor 'doing nothing;' and as confidence is an important part of the cure, the rule cannot be made absolute. 'But as often as it can be adopted it should. By degrees, the doctrine will work its way, that medical attendants are required to survey, superintend, and direct disease, to watch lest harm accrue unnoticed, to employ active remedies when required, or not to interfere at all, as seems to their own judgment best. Every case of successful treatment without medicines will assist to indoctrinate the public with this view. By learning how much nature can do without medicines, people will be able to perceive more correctly how much medicines, when they are necessary, can assist nature.'
The following is given as an example of a case of non-interference. 'A child, above the age of infancy, is chilly, looks dull around its eyes, has headache, pain in the back, quick pulse, and no appetite. It is not known that the digestive organs have been overtaxed. The case may prove--anything. A local inflammation not yet made manifest by local pain; the commencement of continued, or remittent, or exanthematous fever; in a word, there is scarcely any ailment of children of which this may not be the commencement. _If_, on careful examination, no local disease can be made out, we have no correct indication for special treatment. Give nature fair play. Put the child into a warm bed in a warm room, keep it quiet, stop the supplies of food, but not of water, and wait. When reaction takes place, if there be anything serious, it shews itself, and we then know what to attend to. Very frequently, the case is one of mere ephemeral febrile disorder, from exposure to cold; and in two or three days, the child is perfectly well again, without having taken either medicines or globules. But have we done nothing? When the heart was striving to restore the balance of the circulation, by adopting the recumbent posture, we gave it less work to do. The equable warmth of bed was soothing to the nervous system, and solicited the afflux of blood to the surface. By abstinence, we avoided ministering to congestion of the viscera, and introducing food which, as it could not be properly digested, would decompose and irritate the stomach and bowels.' Here the do-nothing doctor actually assisted nature; he took care that she should not be thwarted in her operations, and he stood by watching the case, like an attorney at the examination of a prisoner, who does nothing, but whose presence is essential to his client. If the usual counteracting remedies had been administered, a disease would have been induced, for which a process of convalescence would have had to be gone through. If the globules had been given simultaneously with the hygienic treatment described, Homoeopathy instead of nature would have had the credit of the cure.