nd fare worse, for you may be assured that its
members recognize no principle which hinders their accepting any remedial
agent proved to be useful, no matter from what quarter it comes. The
difficulty is that the stragglers, organized under fantastic names in
pretentious associations, or lurking in solitary dens behind doors left
ajar, make no real contributions to the art of healing. When they bring
forward a remedial agent like chloral, like the bromide of potassium,
like ether, used as an anesthetic, they will find no difficulty in
procuring its recognition.

Some of you will probably be more or less troubled by the pretensions of
that parody of mediaeval theology which finds its dogma of hereditary
depravity in the doctrine of psora, its miracle of transubstantiation in
the mystery of its triturations and dilutions, its church in the people
who have mistaken their century, and its priests in those who have
mistaken their calling. You can do little with persons who are disposed
to accept these curious medical superstitions. The saturation-point of
individual minds with reference to evidence, and especially medical
evidence, differs, and must always continue to differ, very widely.
There are those whose minds are satisfied with the decillionth dilution
of a scientific proof. No wonder they believe in the efficacy of a
similar attenuation of bryony or pulsatilla. You have no fulcrum you can
rest upon to lift an error out of such minds as these, often highly
endowed with knowledge and talent, sometimes with genius, but commonly
richer in the imaginative than the observing and reasoning faculties.

Let me return once more to the young graduate. Your relations to your
professional brethren may be a source of lifelong happiness and growth in
knowledge and character, or they may make you wretched and end by leaving
you isolated from those who should be your friends and counsellors. The
life of a physician becomes ignoble when he suffers himself to feed on
petty jealousies and sours his temper in perpetual quarrels. You will be
liable to meet an uncomfortable man here and there in the
profession,--one who is so fond of being in hot water that it is a wonder
all the albumen in his body is not coagulated. There are common barrators
among doctors as there are among lawyers,--stirrers up of strife under
one pretext and another, but in reality because they like it. They are
their own worst enemies, and do themselves a mischief ea