, also, in medical science,

DISEASE HAS CERTAIN UNMISTAKABLE SIGNS,

or symptoms, and, by reason of this fact, we have been enabled to
originate and perfect a system of determining with the greatest accuracy
the nature of chronic diseases without seeing and personally examining
our patients. In recognizing diseases without a personal examination of
the patient, we claim to possess no miraculous powers. We obtain our
knowledge of the patient's disease by the practical application of
well-established principles of modern science to the practice of
medicine. And it is to the accuracy with which this system has endowed
us that we owe our almost world-wide reputation for the skillful
treatment of all lingering, or chronic, affections. This system of
practice, with the marvelous success which has been attained through it,
demonstrates the fact that diseases display certain phenomena, which,
being subjected to scientific analysis, furnish abundant and
unmistakable data to guide the judgment of the skillful practitioner
aright in determining the nature of diseased conditions.

So successful has been this method of treating patients at a distance
that there is scarcely a city or a village in the United States that is
not represented by one or more cases upon the "Records of Practice" at
the Invalids' Hotel and Surgical Institute. In all chronic diseases that
are curable by medical treatment, it is only in very rare cases that we
cannot do as well for the patient while he or she remains at home, as if
here in person to be examined. But we annually treat hundreds of cases
requiring surgical operations and careful after-treatment, and in these
cases our Invalids' Hotel, or home, is indispensable. Here the patient
has the services not only of the most skillful surgeons, but also, what
is quite as necessary in the after treatment, of thoroughly trained and
skilled nurses.

What should be the essential characteristics of an Invalids' Home?

CLIMATE.

Obviously, the most important of these characteristics is _climate_.
Climatology, from being a mere speculative theory, has arisen to the
deserved rank of a science. The influence of the climate of a country on
the national character has long been observed and acknowledged. The
languid but passionate temperaments of the South are like its volcanoes,
now quiet and silent, anon bursting forth with terrible activity,
flooding entire cities with molten fire; or, like its skies,