l and non-professional
reader, and also because it places medicine and physicians in the true
light, and holds forth to the world the wonderfully recuperative power
of nature, and the vast importance of giving heed to the laws of health
and to the voice of physiology.

CHAPTER LXIV.

GETTING INTO A CIRCLE.

The oddity of some of my captions may seem to require an apology; but I
beg the doubtful reader to suspend any unfavorable decisions, till he
has read the chapter which follows. He will not, either in the present
instance or in any other, be introduced to a magic ring, or to the
mysteries of modern "spiritualism." The circle into which my patient
fell, was of a different description.

A young mother from the west, about the year 1840, came to consult me
with regard to her health. Not being able to receive her into my own
family, I made arrangements for her reception in the immediate
neighborhood, where she remained for a long time. She was a
dyspeptic--if not of giant magnitude, but little short of it.

I spent many an hour in endeavoring to set all right, both in mind and
body. It was, however, much easier to set her head right, than her
hands, feet, and stomach. She had been under the care of almost all
sorts of medical men--hydropathic, homoeopathic, and allopathic. Some of
them, from all these schools, had been men of good sense, while a much
larger proportion of them had turned out to be fools, and had done her
more harm than good. In short, like the woman in the New Testament, she
had spent much on many physicians, and was nothing bettered by it, but
rather made worse.

Under such circumstances what ground was there for hope? What she most
needed, it was easy to see, was a little more of resolution to carry out
and complete what she believed to be her duty. I told her so. I told her
how many times I had repeated to her the same directions; while she,
after the lapse of a very few days,--sometimes only a day or two,--had
come round again, in her remarks and inquiries, to the very point whence
she had first started. I told her how easy a thing this getting into a
circle was, and how difficult it was to escape from it.

Although she perfectly understood her condition, there was still a
strange and almost unaccountable reaching forth for something beyond the
plain path of nature, which I had faithfully and repeatedly pointed out
to her. She wished for some shorter road, something mysterious or
magi