ht attacks of colds,
of rheumatic pains, every week, in this city alone. Hundreds of them do
something or other in the way of remedy, by medical or other advice, or
of their own motion, and the last thing they do gets the credit of the
recovery. Think what a crop of remedies this must furnish, if it were
all harvested!

Experience has taught, or will teach you, that most of the wonderful
stories patients and others tell of sudden and signal cures are like
Owen Glendower's story of the portents that announced his birth. The
earth shook at your nativity, did it? Very likely, and

"So it would have done,
At the same season, if your mother's cat
Had kittened, though yourself had ne'er been born."

You must listen more meekly than Hotspur did to the babbling Welshman,
for ignorance is a solemn and sacred fact, and, like infancy, which it
resembles, should be respected. Once in a while you will have a patient
of sense, born with the gift of observation, from whom you may learn
something. When you find yourself in the presence of one who is fertile
of medical opinions, and affluent in stories of marvellous cures,--of
a member of Congress whose name figures in certificates to the value of
patent medicines, of a voluble dame who discourses on the miracles she
has wrought or seen wrought with the little jokers of the sugar-of-milk
globule-box, take out your watch and count the pulse; also note the time
of day, and charge the price of a visit for every extra fifteen, or, if
you are not very busy, every twenty minutes. In this way you will turn
what seems a serious dispensation into a double blessing, for this class
of patients loves dearly to talk, and it does them a deal of good, and
you feel as if you had earned your money by the dose you have taken,
quite as honestly as by any dose you may have ordered.

You must take the community just as it is, and make the best of it.
You wish to obtain its confidence; there is a short rule for doing this
which you will find useful,--deserve it. But, to deserve it in full
measure, you must unite many excellences, natural and acquired.

As the basis of all the rest, you must have all those traits of
character which fit you to enter into the most intimate and confidential
relations with the families of which you are the privileged friend and
counsellor. Medical Christianity, if I may use such a term, is of very
early date. By the oath of Hippocrates, the practitioner of anci