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Thus there exists a fashion in medicine, as in the other affairs of life, regulated by the caprice and supported by the authority of a few leading practitioners, which has been frequently the occasion of dismissing from practice valuable medicines, and of substituting others less certain in their effects and more questionable in their nature. As years and fashions revolve, so have these neglected remedies, each in its turn, risen again into favour and notice, whilst old receipts, like old almanacks, are abandoned until the period may arrive, that will once more adapt them to the spirit and fashion of the times. Thus it happens that most of our “New Discoveries” in the Materia Medica have turned out to be no more than the revival and adaptation of ancient practices. In the last century, the root of the Aspidium Filix, the Male Fern, was retailed as a secret nostrum by Madame Nouffleur, a French empiric, for the cure of tape worm; the secret was purchased for a considerable sum of money by Louis XV. and the physicians then discovered that the same remedy had been administered in that complaint by Galen.^[65]