should have been ready to adopt them as my own, if they had
been challenged.

The young Doctor discourses.

"I am very glad," he said, "that we have a number of practitioners among
us who confine themselves to the care of single organs and their
functions. I want to be able to consult an oculist who has done nothing
but attend to eyes long enough to know all that is known about their
diseases and their treatment,--skilful enough to be trusted with the
manipulation of that delicate and most precious organ. I want an aurist
who knows all about the ear and what can be done for its disorders. The
maladies of the larynx are very ticklish things to handle, and nobody
should be trusted to go behind the epiglottis who has not the tactus
eruditus. And so of certain other particular classes of complaints. A
great city must have a limited number of experts, each a final authority,
to be appealed to in cases where the family physician finds himself in
doubt. There are operations which no surgeon should be willing to
undertake unless he has paid a particular, if not an exclusive, attention
to the cases demanding such operations. All this I willingly grant.

"But it must not be supposed that we can return to the methods of the old
Egyptians--who, if my memory serves me correctly, had a special physician
for every part of the body--without falling into certain errors and
incurring certain liabilities.

"The specialist is much like other people engaged in lucrative business.
He is apt to magnify his calling, to make much of any symptom which will
bring a patient within range of his battery of remedies. I found a case
in one of our medical journals, a couple of years ago, which illustrates
what I mean. Dr. ___________ of Philadelphia, had a female patient with
a crooked nose,--deviated septum, if our young scholars like that better.
She was suffering from what the doctor called reflex headache. She had
been to an oculist, who found that the trouble was in her eyes. She went
from him to a gynecologist, who considered her headache as owing to
causes for which his specialty had the remedies. How many more
specialists would have appropriated her, if she had gone the rounds of
them all, I dare not guess; but you remember the old story of the siege,
in which each artisan proposed means of defence which he himself was
ready to furnish. Then a shoemaker said, 'Hang your walls with new
boots.'

"Human nature is the same with medical