ve served your time, I will make your
fortune. Without more ado, I will initiate you in the healing art, of
which I have for so many years been at the head. Other physicians make the
science to consist of various unintelligible branches; but I will shorten
the road for you, and dispense with the drudgery of studying natural
philosophy, pharmacy, botany, and anatomy. Remember, my friend, that
bleeding and drinking warm water are the two grand principles--the true
secret of curing all the distempers incident to humanity.

"Yes, this marvelous secret which I reveal to you, and which nature,
beyond the reach of my colleagues, has not been able to conceal from me,
is comprehended in these two articles, namely, bleeding and drenching.
Here you have the sum total of my philosophy; you are thoroughly bottomed
in medicine, and may raise yourself to the summit of fame on the shoulders
of my long experience. You may enter into partnership at once, by keeping
the books in the morning and going out to visit patients in the afternoon.
While I dose the nobility and clergy, you shall labor in your vocation
among the lower orders; and when you have felt your ground a little, I
will get you admitted into our body. You are a philosopher, Gil Blas,
though you have never graduated; the common herd of them, though they have
graduated in due form and order, are likely to run out the length of their
tether without knowing their right hand from their left."

I thanked the doctor for having so speedily enabled me to serve as his
deputy; and by way of acknowledging his goodness, promised to follow his
system to the end of my career, with a magnanimous indifference about the
aphorisms of Hippocrates. But that engagement was not to be taken to the
letter. This tender attachment to water went against the grain, and I had
a scheme for drinking wine every day snugly among the patients. I left off
wearing my own suit a second time to take up one of my master's and look
like an experienced practitioner. After which I brought my medical
theories into play, leaving those it might concern to look to the event.

I began on an alguazil (constable) in a pleurisy; he was condemned to be
bled with the utmost rigor of the law, at the same time that the system
was to be replenished copiously with water. Next I made a lodgment in the
veins of a gouty pastry-cook, who roared like a lion by reason of gouty
spasms. I stood on no more ceremony with his blood than with