^vbrabarc i!. tithen.
'—'    O   *•—
/3 
 
 
Litkof J. Bieu..N.Y. 
HOMOEOPATHY IN NEW-YORK,
AND THE LATE
ABRAHAM  D. WILSON, A. M., M. D.
   BY HIS EARLY FRIEND


JOHN F. GRAY
            A-   ' "   '■■/
           co l::;uakt.:?


             NEW-YORK:
PUBLISHED BY REQUEST OF THE HOMOEOPATHIC MEDICAL SOCIETIES OF THE
          COUNTY AND STATE OF NEW-YORK.
        William S. Dorr, Printer, 101 Nassau Street.
                1865. 
 
AN  ADDRESS
BEFORE THE
iomaropt^t glctol Batltb of % Cranfjj of iftto-gorh,
AT ITS ANNIVERSARY OF
Hahneman's Birth-Day, April 10, 1865.
 Hihi amicoram defunctorum cogitatlo dulcis ac Wanda est;  habui enim illos
tanquam amissurus ; amisi, tanquam babeam.
                                                 Seneca. 
 
ADDRESS.
Mr. President, and Gentlemen of the Society :
TWO years ago to-night, at the request  of the
   societies of New-York and Brooklyn, I had the
honor to recite  to  you the unpublished details of
the first epoch  of Homoeopathy in America.   It
began with the advent of Dr. Gram in 1826 ; dur-
ing which year he printed and distributed his own
correct but  infelicitous translation of Hahneman's
Spirit of the Homoeopathic System of Medicine ;
and it ended with the appearance of the English
versions of  the Organon and Jahr's Manual of  the
Materia Medica, which, revised somewhat by Her-
ing and Hull, were reprinted at Allentown and
here about 1837 to 1841.  As during this period of
twelve years in  which Homoeopathy could only be
studied and tested by  German physicians, or by 
                       6

 Americans of unusual culture, and as it had been my
 happiness to know Dr. Gram, the first pioneer, and
 each  of his colleagues, very intimately, and  also
 Dr. Hering  and  his German associates from the
 time of their arrival in North America, it gave me
 profound satisfaction to comply with your request,
 and, from memory, to review the good  traits  and
 characteristic works of such of the founders of our
 school in this city and its environs as had passed
 away from our  companionship in homoeopathy for-
 ever.   On that pleasant occasion we were prevent-
 ed, by an imperative professional engagement, from
 enjoying the presence and listening to the confirm-
 atory testimony of the only one of our number who
 could aid my recollection of the men and events of
 that epoch;  but, before the Annals went to press,
 I submitted them to his revision, and they received
 his most earnest approval and full endorsement.—
 And now, again I come, my worthy associates and
 friends, at your command—the last you  can possi-
 bly feel it necessary to lay upon me—to aid you
 with those details and elements of that  brave and
good man's  own career which belong to the time 
7
before you had the happiness to know him, and to
join you in paying the tribute which Truth and
Love—that is to say, Justice-;—demands at our hands
to the memory of our friend and much loved brother
Abraham D. Wilson.
   At our  former festal  celebration of this  ever-
memorable day, Gram, Channing, Hull, Joslin, Cur-
tis—diligent students of our great art, faithful and
intrepid disciples and followers of Truth in all ways
and directions—came, in response to our invocation,
to pass their review in our midst, and to impress the
peculiar but ever-potent word of each one's charac-
ter and life-work upon each of us their  survivors
and sometime companions.  Let us  not obliterate
the good legend from either of their signets !   Ad
hue slat I
   If to  be constantly  aware of  the  health and
prosperity of our friends be one  of the main-
springs of our own content and enjoyment in this
lower life, so checkered with inevitable molestations
and trials ;  and if to part company with  them by
death be an irretrievable loss from these the choic-
est stores of earth ; it is nevertheless fit that we tern- 
8
per our mourning-sorrows, and compensate at least
in some part these irreparable privations, not only by
recalling their kindnesses to us and to others around
their  pathway, but  also by so imbuing ourselves
with their virtues of life as ever at the beck of me-
mory to feel their moral portraits, and thus to pos-
sess without loss their true and eternal presence in
our own highest and best  nature.  This resource,
given to each of  us His children  by the all-good
Father, is certainly of growing efficacy as His cease-
less Time  bears us  on toward the grave,  and His
holy  Providence  surrounds us with  this  class of
clouds which must ever multiply and thicken as we
approach its portals.   Our  friend's physical form is
with  us  no longer;  it has gone for evermore to
mingle  in  new and  other  combinations with  the
elements from which his plastic life-power gathered
it; but that sacred life, with the peculiar flowers of
love and of wisdom which it bore through the earth-
form it created, may be with us still, if we but truly
deserve its  presence.   For God gives us this remedy
for mourning the departure of the good companion
—that, by living his  life in ours, and by re-incarna- 
9
 ting his virtues, we may have him with us again ;
 and that more and more perfectly, from day to day,
 from stage to stage in  our  advances toward  him,
 till, by our own death-birth, we re-establish in the
 better life the  companionship of uses with him
 which he began with and for us here, and in which
 he awaits our coming.
   Let us then, dear friends, review the career of our
 risen, elder colleague, with reference  to  the found-
 ing and  extension of Homoeopathy in this city; for
 this is not only his peculiar and characteristic rela-
 tion with us, and with this society incorporated by
 the state for the effecting of our common purpose,
 but his conduct  and work in it, his  sacrifices for
 Truth's sake, or what he deemed such, form an im-
 perishable test and measure of his activity and con-
 stitution as an immortal—as a member of that great
 brotherhood toward which we are trending, and in
 which we are to take our place, near or remote from
 him, as our lives and purposes square with or  devi-
 ate from his.  We would  utter no prattle of childish
 panegyric; but in paying our grateful  tribute to
Wilson's character, strive mainly after a fullrecog-
                        3 
                       10
nition of the ways of Providence in the amelioration
of the  Art of Healing,  by which our age and this
our noble country have, in some appreciable degree,
been released from harsh and devastating errors  in
its practice.  With this view always before us, it is
our pleasant duty to  look sharply into the record of
each man who stood intrepidly in his place in the
opening conflict with entrenched wrong,  and fairly
met the sacrifices and the obloquy which  that  con-
flict initiated and entailed  upon him.  Hereby,  in
our little measure, we encourage the Future while
doing justice to the Past, and thus facilitate the im-
manence of more divine principles and more auspi-
cious usages,  not only in Medicine, but in every
other element of human  advancement and civili-
zation.
  Wilson was already a conspicuous practitioner of
Medicine when he  adopted Homoeopathy.  This
change took place in 1829, the eighth year after his
graduation in the College of Physicians and  Sur-
geons,  and  the twelfth after receiving his baccalau-
reate  in Columbia College.  His social  status and
professional standing were such as to make a strong 
11
sensation respecting the new practice in a wide cir-
cle of  the community at the time.  His father, an
eminent Scottish scholar, was Professor of the Greek
and Latin languages in Columbia College at the time
of his birth, and for many years after.  His brother,
the late George Wilson, an  accomplished counsel-
lor-at-law in the  city, who was  twenty  years his
senior, and therefore able to aid him socially, took
unwearied pains in his behalf.   Moreover, this bro-
ther, as Wilsox told  me not long  before his own
death, earnestly interested himself, after their ven-
erable father's departure, in his culture  in ancient
and modern literatures  and philosophy.   Whatsoe-
ver the  elder brother could accomplish for him in
society, and in aid  of his  professional  career, was
certainly effected with gratifying success.
   Dr. Wilson had also the great advantages in that
day resulting from the personal friendship and pat-
ronage of his illustrious preceptor in Medicine, the
late Dr. David Hosack, in whose private classes he
was a diligent pupil throughout.  Dr. Hosack had
himself received his classical training, in early life,
from Wilson's father, to  whose memory he was most 
                       12

gratefully attached;  and thus it can  be imagined,
how readily this young man's studious qualities were
appreciated, and his  aspirations in the outset of life
fostered, by his powerful preceptor. And, that Wil-
son was a keen and prompt student under Hosack,
accepting and using all the advantages afforded by
his great master's private and public  lectures, and
by the large clinique of the New-York Hospital, in
which Hosack occupied the  leading  position, was
abundantly demonstrated  by  him when, in the  ca-
pacity of a Censor in the County Society, he officia-
ted as examiner of candidates for the diploma of that
body.  Moreover, gentlemen,  those of you who had
the happiness to meet him in council, or in autop-
sies, or, better still,  in the   intimacy of  private
friendship, can fully confirm my testimony.
   Dr. Wilson took his doctor's degree in 1822, and
very soon settled into his professional work, taking
up his residence in Walker-street, where he remain-
ed till a  very recent date, and where  most of us
formed our acquaintance with him.   In his early
manhood he connected himself with  the masonic
fraternity,  a circumstance which seems to have 
13
greatly increased the circle of his personal friends.
Such was the esteem in which that honorable soci-
ety held him, that, on the occasion of his demise, a
Lodge of Mourning  for him was convened in Dod-
worth  Hall, in which a eulogy was pronounced and
afterwards printed by his lodge, in commemoration
of his meritorious relations with that order and with
society; the only instance of the kind that has come
under my notice.  Besides  the proofs cited of Wil-
son's strong social position, I beg to recall to your
memories the impressive scene at the church-edifice
where  his obsequies occurred.  We all  witnessed
with grateful emotions  the deep  earnestness with
which  the clergy and the immense concourse of citi-
zens testified, by worshiping-rites and by most touch-
ing panegyric, to Dr. Wilson's manifold  worth of
professional and personal character among the peo-
ple, and especially in that his hereditary denomi-
nation of Christians.
  With these his advantages of education, which he
nowise neglected in his youth,  and this his felicity
of social position, greatly enhanced by  an early and
ever happy marriage, Wilson  made the acquaint- 
14
ance of Gram and myself, and encountered the great
new problem of his life-work. Homoeopathy.  After
a patient study of its  principles, and a protracted
trial of its art-maxims at the bedside, during all of
which study and trial  he abstained from expressing
a judgment, he decided the question firmly and fully,
for himself and for all his future patients, in the af-
firmative ; and, thenceforward, he openly avowed
his adhesion to the doctrine and discipline of Hahn-
eman.  Wilson came  into our circle  with  all his
stores of sound culture, and with all his indomitable
courage in defence of the Right and the True, or of
whatsoever he so deemed; an  accession of manly
power, of moral force,  which was most cheerfully
welcomed by us at the time, and evermore thereaf-
ter cherished and venerated by us and by all who
came after us.
  I  have said that the avowal  of his change of
practice ensued upon a very mature  and thorough
examination  of  the  questions involved  in  that
change ;  and I  may  add, that  this was  his  me-
thod in all other philosophical and administrative
problems.  His powers of analysis were never  em- 
15
barrassed by the perturbations of his emotional na-
ture.   Though generous even to a decided fault on
some occasions, and full of sympathy at all times and
in every fibre of his being, yet could he at all times
set his reason to work in the 'precision and cool
steadiness of mathematical logic ;  and so it was
his wont to apply his happily dominant rational
power to the largest questions of faith and of prac-
tice in ethics  and tlieosophy,  as well as in ours of
medicine.  His characteristic lay in this rare pecu-
liarity of constitution, one which  belonged to the
old-time philosophers, that he could apply his con-
sciously rational test-processes over  all the lines
sketched by his  intuitions; and his merit as a man
consisted in this ever-rare quality, that he openly
avowed and sustained whatsoever he found to be true
by this his double process of  investigation—prolep-
sis and demonstration.
   Wilson took this great step—Homoeopathy—as I
have said, with a deliberation and courage consonant
with his training in letters and science and with his
constitution as a man.  He was no adventurer in this
community, with nothing to lose by the change, and 
16
perhaps a gain to  make  by heralding a novelty in
medicine.  Nor was he, by any view of his consti-
tution, an eager innovator—a reformer of popular
mistakes; but, rather, from his harmonic tendencies,
(he loved music) and his cordial social rapport with
all the good-meaning people of his place and times,
he was a conservative ; he was indulgent to harm-
less  errors and indisposed  to violent uprootings.
Nevertheless, he went with his convictions of Truth
whensoever these were fully ripe in his soul; like
the great apostle to the Gentiles, he consulted  not
with flesh and blood when beneficent Truth called
for volunteers in her divine  conflicts, wheresoever
and howsoever to be fought.
   Bitter were the pangs  and sore the costs of this
bold change  for the accomplished and successful
young  Wilson.  In less than two years  after his
adoption of the New Method—that is to say, in 1831
—when the birth of the last of his children had ren-
dered the demands of family-support strongest upon
him, his change had already deprived him of all his
family practice save one.   Of that goodly broad
basis founded by his familiar associates among  the 
17
 Masons, in the Dutch Church, of which he Was a
 cherished member, and from among his family ad-
 herents, including those of  his brother the Coun-
 selor, only one stood by him, Mr. Thomas Dugan,
 sexton of St. George's, who happened to have  been
 a mutual friend of Wilson and myself.
   But these gloomy attributes of our position, the
 inevitable acerbities of  changing our relations  with
 teachers and professional  friends and daily  asso-
 ciates, were not without their uses.  They gave us
 cohesion among ourselves; and the losses of practice
 by which they were accompanied afforded  us ample
 leisure for prosecuting our study of the New Materia
 Medica, with the language and literature of Homoe-
 opathy, which we did with assiduity, zeal and bound-
 less hope, under the ever-patient and loving atten-
 tion of Gram.  His society, with its rich resources
 in all other as well as in medical philosophising, was
 a compensation of no mean weight for the numerous
 intimacies that were harshly ruptured; and we felt
 then, as time has since demonstrated, that we were
 to be repaid for all by the income of a broader  and
deeper usefulness from these very trials than could
                      3 
18
be reached in any other way.  Wilson, Hull and I
studied Botany also with Gram,  as  stated on the
former occasion.  In all the floral season of each
year from '29 to '33  we  found time to make short
botanical excursions, not only in search of the ho-
moeopathic remedies indigenous in our region, all of
which we examined as lessons in  botanical dissec-
tion, and abundant collections of which we gathered
for use, but also of most of the wild plants of distin-
guished beauty and  scientific interest.
   It will give me great pleasure, now in my declining
years, to lead my young friends once more, nay every
year, over the grounds, now hallowed in  my heart
and memory, where we found the  Drosera rotundi-
folia (after three summers' sharp search) surrounded
by bright specimens of Kalmia, Rhododendra, Rhoes,
and by that wonderful thing the Saracenia, recently
added to our Materia Medica. Such happy pilgrim-
ages would not only renew for me the balmy asso-
ciations of other days  and  of friendships now  by
death conserved beyond all change, but they would
furnish me opportunities of placing in your pathway
the means of refitting your apparatus with a few of 
19
 our best remedies with your own hands, which our
 immortal master so stringently commends, and also
 with a true incarnation in your own experience
 hereafter of the sentiment I am now endeavoring to
 portray:
        ----Forsan et haec olim meminiase juvabit!

   We learnt from Gram in those  days of forced lei-
 sure not only the right interpretation of Hahneman's
 most abstruse essays touching the principles of our
 art, and his pains-taking diagnosis of remedies in his
 Materia Medica, but also practised the preparation
 of most of the remedies, especially of the more diffi-
 cult ones; as, Stannum, Aurum metallicum, Argen-
 tum, Cuprum, Silicea, and also of many indigenous
 plants.  Moreover, he taught us to respect Mesmer's
 great discovery, in which, with other learned Scan-
 dinavian and German physicians,  he had made very
 careful and extended researches several years before
 he came to this country. But of  the use of Animal
 Magnetism in therapeutics,  Gram  was very  sparing
 indeed, adopting the maxims of Hahneman in the
Organon, and especially his caution against produ- 
20
cing  the  profounder shades  of  trance.   In this
great topic, which I  think will at no  very distant
day engage the unreserved attention of all scientific
bodies, and which ought rather to be called Psycho-
Dynamics than Animal Magnetism, Gram  and his
coterie were  thirty years ago far  in advance of the
experimenters of Reichenbach's school, and of the
avowed Spiritualists  of the present day.
   Although Wilson, Hull and myself did not in
latter years fully coincide with Gram and Hahneman
in reference to the number or classes of morbid con-
ditions in which this agency ought to be used, inas-
much as we used it with excellent results in a  wider
range of cases, and also sometimes to the extent of
producing complete ansesthesia, yet we agreed to the
last of Wilson's days that, as it ever is a spiritual
force interiorly, it should be applied only for healing
the sick, never for pastime or mere amusement, and
always under the direction of an enlightened physi-
cian.  The irresponsible and indiscriminate use of
this power, so generally in vogue at the present day,
is greatly to be deplored; and I hope the physicians
of our school (who  certainly all of them ought to 
21
know something scientifically on the subject, seeing
that it was  formally treated  by Hahneman  in the
Organon over fifty years ago) will lend their com-
bined influence to the suppression of this dangerous
abuse. The zoomagnetic trance certainly challenges
investigation and must  receive  it;  but the  sooner
the medical profession study it, in a truly scientific
and orderly method,  the  sooner will  the  civilized
world be saved from the manifold errors and follies
to which it has given  rise the world  over,  and, I
may add, in all  the ages of human history.
  Wilson's first contribution to Homoeopathy was,
certainly, a very heavy  one.  He brought to its altar
classical erudition, a felicitous condition in society,
and a hopeful and rapidly growing status in his pro-
fession.  His  unusual  advantages  were, I must
believe, diligently appropriated, beginning  at Co-
lumbia  College, where he was born  and  reared
among  the  students and  professors and admitted
as early and  often  as  he pleased  to  all their lec-
tures, libraries,  and  exercises in the  sciences and
belles lettres, and ending  with the resources of  his
most liberal and justly  distinguished  medical pre- 
22
ceptor Dr. Hosack.  It was also my good fortune to
pass the last two years of my professional studies in
Dr. Hosack's office, joining his large private classes
just after Wilson's graduation; and I can testify—
and with me our noble colleague Dr. W. C. Palmer,
also a successor to Wilson in  Hosack's office—to
the rigor of the old master's examinations, and the
inestimable value of his clinical precepts and in-
structions.   Dr. A. E.  Hosack, our surgeon, recol-
lects  Wilson's student-days  in his father's office,
and speaks of his standing  there, and in the College
of Physicians, in  very high terms.   These advanta-
ges, so faithfully used, added to his excellent natural
endowments for the  exercise of our art, while they
could not exempt him and his young family from
the deep chagrin and hard  privations inevitably
connected with his change of  practice, furnish you
to-day and here with testimonials of his worth as a
man and of his merit as a physician, which you will
not fail to cherish and keep in ever bright  remem-
brance as long as  dignity of deportment and strength
of  character hold their rightful  position  in your
hearts. 
23
   In the third year of this unwelcome trial of Wil-
 son's fortitude, the Asiatic cholera made its first ap-
 pearance here, and the success which attended  our
 treatment of it, brought  to him and the rest of us
 some mitigation of our losses and sacrifices.   Dr.
 Chinning,  and  many other  old-school physicians,
 visited our offices and met us in practice to witness
 our results.   Very many  of them added  camphor
 (the least important and the least  homoeopathic to
 cholera of all our remedies) to their own compound
 prescriptions.   Our status with the profession was
 for a year or two less acerb and troublesome, and
 we soon after began to receive scanty accessions of
 patients and families in place of the flocks that had
 left us.
   Wilson's second contribution to Homoeopathy was
 as severe a test of his uprightness as the first was of
 his fortitude and perseverance under trials.  He felt
 bound to give all the  patients that came to him,
 after the affluent tide  began,  the fullest benefit of
 Homoeopathy;  and to this end he brought them  to
 Gram in every case of importance, and also in all
other cases when his registration of symptoms did 
24
not enable Gram to find  the remedy with satisfac-
tory accuracy.
  Dr. A. Johnson, our good homoeopathic dentist,
was then a student of Dr. Gram,  in  company with
Curtis and  Van Buren, (now  of Louisville, Ken-
tucky) and he well remembers the daily and almost
hourly consultations of Wilson and  Channing with
Gram in those days. Wilson did riot study German.
and therefore could not hunt a remedy himself, ex-
cept tentatively in the Latin fragmenta of Hahne-
man.  But he would do his whole duty to his pa-
tients ; and so his practice failed  again, or, rather,
grew  very languidly indeed for four or five  years
more—that is to say, till we had the English version
of the Materia Medica, such as it was, and (pity and
shame to say) still is.   By this course of conduct on
his part and mine, (until  I  acquired the  German)
Homoeopathy gained  many  substantial  adherents
and a broad  basis in this community, long before
Wilson recovered his professional status or retrieved
his pecuniary losses;  for Gram made many indispu-
table cures of chronic diseases by his truly Hahne-
manean faithfulness in recording the symptoms, and 
t
                        25

 his conscientious preparation and administration of
 the remedies.   Such cures establish and extend our
 therapeutic method far more than all books, lectures,
 societies and colleges.  Hahneman himself, powerful
 as was his logic, unanswerable as were all his first
 positions and  trenchant as were his early essays in
 their statement  and support, founded his school of
 practice in the world mainly, I might say solely, by
 this class of cures.  Without real  and durable cures,
 oft repeated by him and  by his early disciples, his
 Organon and Materia  Medica would have slept for-
 ever on the same shelves that  hold  the elaborate
 works of Darwin and  Cullen, of Broussais and For-
 dyce, of Mason Good and Martyn Paine.
   Our brave friend's third and last contribution  to
 Homoeopathy was, the steady devotion of the last
 thirty years of his grand life to  the healing of the
 sick, the soothing of mourners, and the uplifting by
 sympathy, by wise counsels and by material aid, of
 all those whom Providence placed within his peculiar
 sphere of work and duty.   He  was no worker  in
its literature, nor did he formally receive pupils for
systematic instruction  in  the art; nevertheless, as 
4
                       26

those of you well know who saw him officiate as Cen-
sor in the examination of Candidates for the License,
he had fine qualifications for writing and teaching.
His was the unostentatious propagandism of a skill-
ful private practice, joined to a beneficent and ever-
active private life.  It owed its starting-force to the
circumstance of his conversion having occurred, as I
have said, from a prosperous position  in  the old
school, and at the very beginning of the movement
in America; but its total and permanent value is to
be sought for in the general welfare of our school in
this metropolis, and in  the  influences in  its favor
which flow from our dispensaries, societies, journals,
and our college, into other cities and states of the
republic.
   Without Gram and Hull, Channing and  Wilson,
you could not  have had  the basis from which you
suddenly developed from  an unperceived squadron
into  a formidable army,  within the short space of
two or three years after the publication  of the text-
books of our school in  our language.  For, among
the great cities of the old world, and even of Ger-
many itself, our system has no where such resources, 
27
 influence or numbers, as it possesses here  in New-
 York.
    Without these  men and their  benefactive lives,
 and without the societies and movements inaugura-
 ted in the first or latent epoch here—which, in 1840,
 culminated in the appearance of the Homoeopathic
 Examiner by Hull, and  in the Society, partly lay
 and partly professional, of which our Bryant was
 the last President—the later and apparently more effi-
 cacious means of your success could not have been in
 your hands.   Thus, for instance, the American In-
 stitute  of Homoeopathy,  founded in  1843 by my
 personal efforts, the  incorporation  of  County and
 State Societies by the Legislature, and the founding
 of Infirmaries and Dispensaries through the action
 of others among  you, could not  have occurred.
 Forget  not  your beginnings; honor your deceased
 predecessors;  for they were and are worthy of your
 respect, nay, of your veneration!  Our status is with
 and from the  people; and they by hundreds—nay,
 by many thousands—remember these  skillful, good
physicians, and receive us with glad confidence on
account of the cures they effected in their families
a generation ago. 
28
  In my former discourse, I  called your attention
to the divergence of views respecting doses and di-
lutions which arose in our little band soon after the
accession of Dr. Channing, that is to say, about thirty
years ago.  Channing adhered to the later and latest
practice  of Hahneman  in this matter, at all times
and  in  all cases, to the last; whilst the rest of us,
after trying the  question faithfully in a sufficient
number and range of diseases,  receded  to Hahne-
man's first  method, i. e.  to the  doses recommended
in the first and second editions of the Materia Me-
dica.  This difference in the school must, I think,
last a very long series of years.  I neither arrogate
for myself nor claim for my dear departed associates
either acumen or merit of any kind in the premises,
which I do not heartily recognize in Hering and the
other many able and distinguished men of our school,
whose observation and experience lead them to con-
clusions  and practice  very widely differing from
mine, and from those  of a very large majority of
American Homoeopathists.  My maxim and rule of
life,  since the earliest hour of my hard experience
with brother physicians in this whole question, has 
29
been, in certis unitas ;  in dubiis libertas ; in omnibus
caritas.   Of the large number of students who have
graduated from my office, several of whom I have
the happiness to meet at this festive board to-night,
each one will testify to  the entire freedom accorded
to them on the question of doses, dilutions and repe-
titions.   Several of them indeed, especially those
who studied Hahneman in the German, left me be-
lievers in his posology,  and remained so for various
periods  of time.  Of this class of my pupils I now
recall Drs, Hull, Metcalf and Gilbert, and our pre-
sent colleague Dr. Quin.  Neither Gram, Wilson
nor  myself ever denied  the  efficiency  of highly
attenuated  drugs, nor  were  we  justified  by our
school of personal  discipline  in deriding  the sin-
cere convictions of others on any topic,  either in
medicine, religion or political science; and, accord-
ingly, the gentlemen who favored  higher attenua-
tions than we considered it best for us to use in our
practice, were ever as  thoroughly and cordially re-
cognized and consulted  with by  us  as to  choice of
remedies, as were those who agreed with  us in re-
gard to  doses.  There ought  to  be liberty to differ 
30
herein, for posology is by no means, as yet, a positive
science ; he who thinks he has philosophic certitude
in it to-day, may find grounds of skepticism  before
to-morrow's sun rises.   Our characteristic of a Ho-
moeopathist lies  not in the dose, but altogether in
this—that he affirm the maxim in therapeutics,
similia similibus curantur ; and that, to enable us to
find the needful analogy of likeness between drug-
powers and  diseased vital powers, we must test the
drugs for this purpose on the healthy.  We moreover
expect him to deny the two fundamental assumptions
of Allopathy, namely: 1, that it is possible to cognise
the essence of life, and to found on such cognition a sci-
entific idea of diseased vital action; and, 2, that it
is possible to cognize drug-powers in the same way,
i. e. by ontologic speculations based upon their phy-
sical appearance or chemical properties.
  As  the whole of Allopathy, excepting its empiri-
cal tradita, (alone worthy of attention) is  founded
on these transcendental bases, these two pure  and
mere assumptions, equally devoid of possible proofs,
we can conceive  of no one being at the same time
an adherent of the two schools.  There can be no 
31
eclecticism in the elements of these two systems ;
no middle course between a Method in the Art of
Healing  founded on purely scientific observation,
and one resting ex professo on assumptions respect-
ing life and power essences.   These views, founded
in and accepted from Hahneman's great essay, " Spirit
of Homoeopathy," came to us in 1826-30;  that is
to say, to myself first, Wilson next, then to Hull,
and lastly to  Channing in '32, through the •transla-
tion and commentaries of the good and great pioneer,
Gram ; and none of us ever deviated from them, or
wavered  in supporting true Homoeopathy.   I  have
been thus careful to recite the details of convictions
and practices in the early days and among the genu-
ine pioneers here in New-York, for reasons which
are  obvious enough to those who knew the founders,
and their merits and sacrifices, but which Time and
Justice,  through some  of my faithful and  learned
survivors, must disclose and elucidate.
  The learned propagandist of Homoeopathy in other
cities, or in foreign lands, may perhaps feel surprise
at your dedicating a  considerable share of this An-
nual Meeting, sacred to its origin and diffusion, to 
32
 the memory of one of your number who contributed
 nothing to its polemic literature, and who did not
 even qualify himself to  teach it to students  by stu-
 dying the language of that literature. Nevertheless,
 you are quite right. You should give glad testimony
 to the great missionary  value of his five-and-thirty
 years clinical work.   For though he gave no public
 lectures in support of Homoeopathy, wrote no books
 and  educated no pupils, yet, as your learned and
 brave predecessor, he bore your standard honorably
 through the opening conflict against vastly superior
 numbers, and, by his skill in diagnosis and prognosis,
 and his assiduity in acquiring the right remedies at
 the hands  of those who could  hunt them for him,
 (maugre the loss of prestige which such dependence
 entailed upon him for a  time) he and his associates
 of that day made ready  for your remunerative and
 happier occupation here in  New-York,  a position
 where you can, if you choose, do great and  lasting
 work for the advacement and expansion of our glo-
 rious  method of healing.  This  pioneer merit  of
Wilson, I  may add, is righteously shared, to some
extent, by  all the well educated gentlemen of our 
33
school who came over to us in the second stage of
its expansion, viz., after the translations were pub-
lished ;  I mean especially those of  this class who
left prosperous positions in the old school and came
to us from conviction of our great truths; who were
impelled toward us by the irrepressible force of
conscience, not allured  by  the hope of acquiring
with us what they could not reach in the old school.
You do right, I say, to honor this clinical expounder
of Homceopathy, this unostentatious propagandist of
our science,  and to embalm his memory forever in
the deepest recesses of your affections; for he  and
his associates have bequeathed to you the means for
surely rewarding all the diligence in  study and all
the scientific research you may devote to the Materia
Medica and to the enriching of your literature;  If
you shall develope here,  in the  metropolis of the
New World, an efficient body  of  experimenters in
Pharmacology ; of honest and capable translators of
the standard literature; of able commentators on the
immortal discoveries of Hahneman;  as, of  late,  I
have seen some hopeful indications  of your  doing ;
you can then rightfully say to the learned and  dis- 
34
tinguished objector, We honor the career and labors
of Wilson, not only for the learning he acquired in
his youth and for the dignity and benefactive worth
of his character, which drew us all toward him in
the best bonds of human affinity, but also because,
by his cures of the thousands who came to him for
relief during his long exercise of our divine art, he
greatly aided to make our  goodly status possible;
because he and his venerated preceptor and  associ-
ates left us the means of study and useful employ-
ment in our  system on a broader scale than they can
elsewhere be found in the civilized world.
  My dear younger friends, you will, I trust,  dili-
gently sow and worthily reap the field of divine uses
which the early pioneers cleared  for you  in  the
wintry months and fallowed for you in the cold and
frosty spring of the  great  year of Homoeopathy.
Pardon me if, assuming the privilege of age, I  im-
plore you to abolish the blatant shams which infest
our school and really imperil its existence; namely,
mistranslations of the Organon and Materia Medica;
false or very defective provings ; and the miserable
imitation of  the old-school monopolies in the teach- 
35
 ing and graduation of students of medicine. Demand
 and produce from among yourselves lecturers upon
 the Institutes who can read the learned languages,
 and also especially the language of the Organon,
 and who have enough of culture  in Philosophy  to
 weigh and expound its Kantian technics  and criti-
 cisms.  You have such men already forming among
 you.   Develope their latent forces; reward their
 industry; honor their acquirements ; and put them
 quickly to their work. Your Art is menaced, sharply
 so, by your defective plan of education for those who
 are to succeed you, and by the very deficient teach-
 ers whom that plan too frequently appoints.  Can
 a man teach Homoeopathy who cannot read German,
 or  Forensic  Medicine who cannot read Latin, the
 language of that branch of the law 1
   Away with shams !  Allopathy can sustain them
 and live out her appointed time; but Homoeopathy
 is akin to positive science, and all her methods de-
 mand correlative integrity in learning, teaching and
 practising them;  she must perish from the  face of
 the earth, unless we adapt our system of degrees or
licenses to her imperative requirements  In the 
36
early time, foreseeing in part these days of pecuni-
ary prosperity to our  school, Gram, Wilson  and I
worked with great diligence in the Medical Societies
of the state and in  the Legislature to procure a re-
formation of the franchise  or monopoly system of
teaching students and of dispensing degrees, but all
our efforts fell to  the ground.  The College had the
advantage of us  in the universal prejudice against
Homoeopathy which the suggesters of the palpably
just and needed change professed, and we were com-
pelled to give up our agitation of the question, after
almost achieving  success in two consecutive sessions
of the Legislature; a success which  would  have
filled the profession of the state with fine classical
scholars, and, through  a limitless competition, have
given Homoeopathy a chair  in every college of
teachers, and a just representation in our army and
in every hospital in the country.   We failed.  The
profession in general has steadily fallen back instead
of advancing in literary and scientific acquirement
till the mass has become incompetent to study Ho-
moeopathy, and  accordingly we receive few  or no
accessions from it by conversion, 
37
  Now, at last, my colleagues,  you have obtained
through  the liberal action of our  state govern-
ment, plenary powers for securing the advancement
of your branch of the profession.  Your  county
societies and your  state society, by proper action,
can establish such  rules for the examination of can-
didates, the dispensing of diplomas, and the appoint-
ment of teachers,  as shall accomplish all that the
pioneers worked for so long in vain, and all that the
future demands at your hands.  You cannot need
new enactments, for you will seek to erect  no mo-
nopoly of Professorships ; and I earnestly implore
you to give us a great  School of Medicine here,  on
a free basis, by prompt, strong and thorough organi-
zation of your  teaching  forces under the  ample
charter-powers you possess.  You have the means
everywise—the needful numbers of learned Homoe-
opathists, and the  beneficence of the opulent friends
 of our mild and efficient treatment—to found such
a School of Medicine.  Made virtute !
   To conclude the task of love you gave me  to do,
my friends, I beg  to say, that Dr. Wilson's key-note
of life  was fraternity.  He loved his family, his 
38
 friends, his country, and his race, each and all, infi-
 nitely more than he loved himself.   He drew near
 especially to the weak and defenceless and  down-
 trodden. To such his strong body, his strong powers
 of sympathy, his copious pecuniary income, were a
 wall of support, each as its resources were needed,
 As in the introduction of Homoeopathy, so in every
 other  phase  and aspect of his benefactive life,  and
 through each day of that whole life, his instinctive
 rule of action was well-being for others, without taking
 thought for his own  self-hood either of to-day or to-*
 morrow. In my long intercourse with him, I knew
 many, very many, shining instances of his lifting
 up the children of want and sorrow; and now, since
 his removal, I come quite frequently upon old cases
 of the kind from the lips of his benficiaries, which
 were sealed during his life-time.
  Wilson was,  by the gift of his Creator, born on
 that plane of uses which most men attain to only
after long conflicts with the  composite forms of self*
 ishness, by sad experiences, and by palpable throes
 of the inner life.  He loved the works of fraternity;
 and he did them  always, and to all who needed 
39
such works, without stint;  Especially was he careful
to aid and honor with his sympathy, and effectively
aid with his money, the unfortunate physician, and
the widows and  orphans of such.  Over Wilson's
grand record the  religion of Jesus writes, "Well
done, good and faithful servant, enter thou into the
joy of thy Master."  His life's signet-ring imprints
for us the wise words of the old Stoic poet:

      Aude, hospes, oontemnere opes, et te quoque dignum
      Finge deo!

And his philosophy, which so grandly aided him in
all the molestations and sorrows of life, and so per-
fectly sustained him in the long and precarious twi-
light of his fatal malady, was the  offspring of his
ever-abounding and most touching humanity.  How
resplendently do the words of Seneca concerning
the relations of Virtue and Wisdom shine  out in the
mirror of such a  life as was our friend's!  " Philoso-
phia  studium virtutis est, sed per  ipsam virtutem, nee
virtus autem esse sine studio sui potest nee virtutis stu-
dium  sine ipsa."