ions, headaches,
giddiness, throbbing in the head, and various nervous symptoms, her
cheeks meantime getting bloodless, and her strength running away
in company with her milk. The old experienced physician, seeing the
yellowish waxy look which is common in anaemic patients, considers it a
"bilious" case, and is for giving a rousing emetic. Of course, he has to
be wheedled out of this, a recipe is written for beefsteaks and porter,
the twins are ignominiously expelled from the anaemic bosom, and forced
to take prematurely to the bottle, and this prolific mother is saved for
future usefulness in the line of maternity.

The practice of making a profit on the medicine ordered has been held up
to reprobation by one at least of the orators who have preceded me. That
the effect of this has been ruinous in English practice I cannot
doubt, and that in this country the standard of practice was in former
generations lowered through the same agency is not unlikely. I have seen
an old account-book in which the physician charged an extra price for
gilding his rich patients' pills. If all medicine were very costly,
and the expense of it always came out of the physician's fee, it
would really be a less objectionable arrangement than this other most
pernicious one. He would naturally think twice before he gave an emetic
or cathartic which evacuated his own pocket, and be sparing of the
cholagogues that emptied the biliary ducts of his own wallet, unless he
were sure they were needed. If there is any temptation, it should not be
in favor of giving noxious agents, as it clearly must be in the case of
English druggists and "General Practitioners." The complaint against
the other course is a very old one. Pliny, inspired with as truly Roman
horror of quackery as the elder Cato,--who declared that the Greek
doctors had sworn to exterminate all barbarians, including the Romans,
with their drugs, but is said to have physicked his own wife to death,
notwithstanding,--Pliny says, in so many words, that the cerates and
cataplasms, plasters, collyria, and antidotes, so abundant in his time,
as in more recent days, were mere tricks to make money.

A pretty strong eddy, then, or rather many eddies, setting constantly
back from the current of sober observation of nature, in the direction
of old superstitions and fancies, of exploded theories, of old ways of
making money, which are very slow to pass out of fashion.

But there are other special Ameri