FRIDAY EVENING

What We Thought We Knew:

Tonics, including some stimulants, are the principal medicines, assisted, as the case may require, by nervines, soporifics, alternatives or cathartics. The lancet is emphatically an instrument of the past, and cups and leeches are very nearly in the same category.

—Dr. Pliny Earle,

Northampton State Hospital Annual Report, 1868