ighty simple matter. When
a person is sick, there is always something to be done for him, and done
at once. If it is only to open or shut a window, if it is only to tell
him to keep on doing just what he is doing already, it wants a man
to bring his mind right down to the fact of the present case and its
immediate needs. Now the present case, as the doctor sees it, is just
exactly such a collection of paltry individual facts as never was
before,--a snarl and tangle of special conditions which it is his
business to wind as much thread out of as he can. It is a good deal as
when a painter goes to take the portrait of any sitter who happens to
send for him. He has seen just such noses and just such eyes and just
such mouths, but he never saw exactly such a face before, and his
business is with that and no other person's,--with the features of the
worthy father of a family before him, and not with the portraits he has
seen in galleries or books, or Mr. Copley's grand pictures of the fine
old Tories, or the Apollos and Jupiters of Greek sculpture. It is the
same thing with the patient. His disease has features of its own; there
never was and never will be another case in all respects exactly like
it. If a doctor has science without common sense, he treats a fever, but
not this man's fever. If he has common sense without science, he treats
this man's fever without knowing the general laws that govern all fevers
and all vital movements. I 'll tell you what saves these last fellows.
They go for weakness whenever they see it, with stimulants and
strengtheners, and they go for overaction, heat, and high pulse, and
the rest, with cooling and reducing remedies. That is three quarters of
medical practice. The other quarter wants science and common sense too.
But the men that have science only, begin too far back, and, before
they get as far as the case in hand, the patient has very likely gone
to visit his deceased relatives. You remember Thomas Prince's
"Chronological History of New England," I suppose? He begins, you
recollect, with Adam, and has to work down five thousand six hundred
and twenty-four years before he gets to the Pilgrim fathers and the
Mayflower. It was all very well, only it did n't belong there, but got
in the way of something else. So it is with "science" out of place. By
far the larger part of the facts of structure and function you find in
the books of anatomy and physiology have no immediate application to the