only be made aware of its own utter ignorance, and incompetence to form
opinions on medical subjects, difficult enough to those who give their
lives to the study of them, the practitioner would have an easier task.
But it will form opinions of its own, it cannot help it, and we cannot
blame it, even though we know how slight and deceptive are their
foundations.

This is the way it happens: Every grown-up person has either been
ill himself or had a friend suffer from illness, from which he has
recovered. Every sick person has done something or other by somebody's
advice, or of his own accord, a little before getting better. There
is an irresistible tendency to associate the thing done, and the
improvement which followed it, as cause and effect. This is the great
source of fallacy in medical practice. But the physician has some chance
of correcting his hasty inference. He thinks his prescription cured a
single case of a particular complaint; he tries it in twenty similar
cases without effect, and sets down the first as probably nothing more
than a coincidence. The unprofessional experimenter or observer has
no large experience to correct his hasty generalization. He wants to
believe that the means he employed effected his cure. He feels grateful
to the person who advised it, he loves to praise the pill or potion
which helped him, and he has a kind of monumental pride in himself as
a living testimony to its efficacy. So it is that you will find the
community in which you live, be it in town or country, full of brands
plucked from the burning, as they believe, by some agency which, with
your better training, you feel reasonably confident had nothing to
do with it. Their disease went out of itself, and the stream from the
medical fire-annihilator had never even touched it.

You cannot and need not expect to disturb the public in the possession
of its medical superstitions. A man's ignorance is as much his private
property, and as precious in his own eyes, as his family Bible. You have
only to open your own Bible at the ninth chapter of St. John's Gospel,
and you will find that the logic of a restored patient was very simple
then, as it is now, and very hard to deal with. My clerical friends
will forgive me for poaching on their sacred territory, in return for an
occasional raid upon the medical domain of which they have now and then
been accused.

A blind man was said to have been restored to sight by a young person
whom