ve methods, and not chiefly to diagnosis,--it would have been
better for me and others. One thing, at any rate, we did learn in the
wards of Louis. We learned that a very large proportion of diseases get
well of themselves, without any special medication,--the great fact
formulated, enforced, and popularized by Dr. Jacob Bigelow in the
Discourse referred to. We unlearned the habit of drugging for its own
sake. This detestable practice, which I was almost proscribed for
condemning somewhat too epigrammatically a little more than twenty years
ago, came to us, I suspect, in a considerable measure from the English
"general practitioners," a sort of prescribing apothecaries. You
remember how, when the city was besieged, each artisan who was called
upon in council to suggest the best means of defence recommended the
articles he dealt in: the carpenter, wood; the blacksmith, iron; the
mason, brick; until it came to be a puzzle to know which to adopt. Then
the shoemaker said, "Hang your walls with new boots," and gave good
reasons why these should be the best of all possible defences. Now the
"general practitioner" charged, as I understand, for his medicine, and
in that way got paid for his visit. Wherever this is the practice,
medicine is sure to become a trade, and the people learn to expect
drugging, and to consider it necessary, because drugs are so universally
given to the patients of the man who gets his living by them.

It was something to have unlearned the pernicious habit of constantly
giving poisons to a patient, as if they were good in themselves, of
drawing off the blood which he would want in his struggle with disease,
of making him sore and wretched with needless blisters, of turning his
stomach with unnecessary nauseous draught and mixtures,--only because he
was sick and something must be done. But there were positive as well as
negative facts to be learned, and some of us, I fear, came home rich in
the negatives of the expectant practice, poor in the resources which many
a plain country practitioner had ready in abundance for the relief and
the cure of disease. No one instructor can be expected to do all for a
student which he requires. Louis taught us who followed him the love of
truth, the habit of passionless listening to the teachings of nature, the
most careful and searching methods of observation, and the sure means of
getting at the results to be obtained from them in the constant
employment of accurate t