Excerpt from How I Became a Homoeopath I AM the son of a doctor. I was born and bred in a medical atmosphere. My father's office was the favorite place for my games when a little boy, and for my reading and study when a youth. The imposing shelves of portly volumes, the big jars of hideous specimens preserved in alcohol, the pervading odors of paregoric and lavender, the bloody-look ing map of the great sympathetic on the wall, the long white skeleton grinning in the closet, and the mysterious box, containing the detached bones of a baby's skull, made a strong impression on my childish imagination. The old brown saddle-bags, with their incredible stores of Vials and packages and pill-boxes excited my special admiration. Physicians were, in my opinion, the wisest and greatest and best of mankind. I saw the whole faculty through the venerated form and character of my good father. We differ as much from our own selves at different times, 'as we do from each other. I have lived to question and scout the old oracles - to abandon the intensely respectable path of routine - to discover in the old brown saddle-bags a Pan dora's box of evils, and to see how much ignorance and mischief are sometimes concealed and consecrated by a medical diploma! My father gave me his name, and I coveted his profession. In that happy period of boyhood, when our stick-horses are as real as grown men's hobbies, I played the little doctor. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.