attractions for his mind, is now complicated with so many little
curious facts about the blood and the nerves, mucous membranes and
muscles, as fully to compensate for any lack of mystery, and is in truth
just as unintelligible as the most involved inconsistency of any written
prescription. Besides this, he has another object which demands his
attention. Plain, common-sense people, who know nothing of physic or its
mysteries, might fall into the fatal error of supposing that the wells
so universally employed by the people of the country for all purposes
of washing, bathing, and cooking, however impregnated by mineral
properties, were still by no means so capable, in proportions of great
power and efficacy, of effecting either very decided results, curative
or noxious. The doctor must set his heel on this heresy at once; he must
be able to show how a sip too much or a half-glass too many can produce
the gravest consequences; and no summer must pass over without at
least one death being attributed to the inconsiderate rashness of some
insensate drinker. Woe unto him then who drinks without a doctor! You
might as well, in an access of intense thirst, rush into the first
apothecary's shop, and take a strong pull at one of the vicious little
vials that fill the shelves, ignorant whether it might not be aqua
fortis or Prussic acid.

Armed, then, with all the terrors of his favourite Spa, rich in a
following which is as much partisan as patient, the Spa doctor has an
admirable life of it. The severe and trying cases of illness that come
under the notice of other physicians fall not to his share; the very
journey to the waters is a trial of strength which guards against this.
His disciples are the dyspeptic "diners-out" in the great worlds of
London, Paris, or Vienna; the nervous and irritable natures, cloyed with
excess of enjoyment and palled with pleasure; the imaginary sick man,
or the self-created patient who has dosed himself into artificial
malady--all of necessity belonging to the higher or at least the
wealthier classes of mankind, with whom management goes further than
medicine, and tact is a hundred times better than all the skill of
Hippocrates. He had need, then, to be a clever man of the world; he may
dispense with science, he cannot with _savoir faire_. Not only must he
be conversant with the broader traits of national character, but he must
be intimately acquainted with the more delicate and subtle workings of
t