for a patient to run counter to the remedies
thus arranged, and communicated by post. Occasionally changes will take
place in a sick man's condition _en route_ which alter the applicability
of his treatment; but, then, what would you have? Brodie and Chambers
are not prophets; divination and augury are not taught in the London and
Middlesex hospitals!

I remember, myself, a marquis of gigantic proportions, who had kept
his prescription by him from the time of his being a stripling till he
weighed twenty stone. The fault here lay not with the doctor. The bath
he was to take contained some powerful ingredient--a preparation of
iron, I believe; well, he got into it, and immediately began swelling
and swelling out, till, big as he was before, he was now twice the size,
and at last, like an overheated boiler, threatened to explode with a
crash. What was to be done? To lift him was out of the question--he
fitted the bath like a periwinkle in its shell; and in this dilemma
no other course was open than to decant him, water and all--which was
performed, to the very considerable mirth of the bystanders.

The Spa doctor, then, it will be seen, moves in a very narrow orbit.
He must manage to sustain his reputation without the aid of the
pharmacopoeia, and continue to be imposing without any assistance from
the dead languages.

Hard conditions! but he yields to them, like a man of nerve.

He begins, then, by extolling the virtues of the waters, which by
analysis of 'his own making,' and set forth in a little volume published
by himself, contain very different properties from those ascribed to
them by others. He explains most clearly to his non-chemical listener
how 'pure silica found in combination with oxide of iron, at a
temperature of thirty-nine and a half, Fahrenheit,' must necessarily
produce the most beneficial effects on the knee-joint; and he describes,
with all the ardour of science, the infinite satisfaction the nerves
must experience when invigorated by 'free carbonic gas' sporting about
in the system. Day by day he indoctrinates the patient into some stray
medical notion, giving him an interest in his own anatomy, and putting
him on terms of familiar acquaintance with the formation of his heart or
his stomach. This flatters the sick man, and, better still, it occupies
his attention. He himself thus becomes a _particeps_ in the first degree
to his own recovery; and the simplicity of treatment, which had at first
no