iseman, kept yourself in such robust
health so long a time?

Wiseman.--By never trifling with it, sir. I never eat muffins too hot. This
one, you see, has had some time to cool. Besides, when I am at all
disordered, I immediately send for the doctor.

There are books proposing that we all become our own medical attendant.
Whenever we are seized with any sort of physical disorder, we are to take
down some volume in homeopathy, allopathy, hydropathy, and running our
finger along the index, alight upon the malady that may be afflicting us.
We shall find in the same page the name of the disease and the remedy.
Thus: chapped hands--glycerine; cold--squills; lumbago--mustard-plasters;
nervous excitement--valerian; sleeplessness--Dover's powders.

This may be very well for slight ailments, but we have attended more
funerals of people who were their own doctor than obsequies of any other
sort. In your inexperience you will be apt to get the wrong remedy. Look
out for the agriculturist who farms by book, neglecting the counsel of his
long-experienced neighbors. He will have poor turnips and starveling wheat,
and kill his fields with undue apportionments of guano and bonedust. Look
out just as much for the patient who in the worship of some "pathy" blindly
adheres to a favorite hygienic volume, rejecting in important cases
medical admonition.

In ordinary cases the best doctor you can have is mother or grandmother,
who has piloted through the rocks of infantile disease a whole family. She
has salve for almost everything, and knows how to bind a wound or cool an
inflammation. But if mother be dead or you are afflicted with a maternal
ancestor that never knew anything practical, and never ill, better in
severe cases have the doctor right away. You say that it is expensive to do
that, while a book on the treatment of diseases will cost you only a dollar
and a half. I reply that in the end it is very expensive for an
inexperienced man to be his own doctor; for in addition to the price of the
book there are the undertaker's expenses.

Some of the younger persons at the table laughed at the closing sentence of
Wiseman, when Doctor Heavyasbricks looked up, put down his knife and said:
"My young friends, what are you laughing at? I see no cause of merriment in
the phrase 'undertaker's expenses.' It seems to me to be a sad business.
When I think of the scenes amid which an undertaker moves, I feel more like
tears than hilarity."

Qu