almed as well as they possibly
could both mind and body and left nature to do the rest, which
she did with the best and most tranquilizing effect. On both
sides, therefore, in the treatment of disease, they did good,
and that was the reason, he believed, why their returns were so
satisfactory. It often happened in an institution where some
particular plan was carried out that the old ideas in which they
had been bred were without intention refined or suppressed. For
example, he had been taught, and believed for a number of years,
that some medicament of a particular kind was needful for some
particular train of symptoms, be the surrounding conditions what
they might. There was no doubt that this same feeling had given
rise to the persistent use of alcohol; but, greatly to his own
surprise, he discovered that when the surroundings were all
good, the rule that applied to alcohol constantly applied to
other substances that were called remedies, with the result that
recovery was often just as good without the particular remedies
as with them, so that a revision came quite simply with regard
to stimulating agents and their properties, and also with
regard to every medicine that might at earlier times have been
employed. He had seen many cases in this hospital recover
without any other aid than that of the environments, which cases
he would have said could not possibly have gone on well, or
towards complete recovery, unless some special recipe had been
followed. He believed the day would come when others, learning
this same truth as he had been obliged to learn it, would act on
such simple principles that the books of remedies would have to
be vastly curtailed. It would be seen that there was such a
tendency of disease to get well of itself, or by virtue of
natural processes, of which people had at present but a very
poor idea, that the art of physic would pass into directions how
to live rather than into dogmatic assertions that particular
means must be employed in addition to the common details of life
for the process of cure. If therefore they learned in this
hospital by their reduced death-rates the true lesson, the
institution would have performed a double duty, and become one
of the test objects in medicine, and in the field of disease.
They made no attempt by selection, or