capacity of understanding the scientific explanation. I
have known the term "spinal irritation" serve well on such occasions,
but I think nothing on the whole has covered so much ground, and meant
so little, and given such profound satisfaction to all parties, as the
magnificent phrase "congestion of the portal system."

Once more, let me recommend you, as far as possible, to keep your
doubts to yourself, and give the patient the benefit of your decision.
Firmness, gentle firmness, is absolutely necessary in this and certain
other relations. Mr. Rarey with Cruiser, Richard with Lady Ann, Pinel
with his crazy people, show what steady nerves can do with the most
intractable of animals, the most irresistible of despots, and the most
unmanageable of invalids.

If you cannot acquire and keep the confidence of your patient, it is
time for you to give place to some other practitioner who can. If you
are wise and diligent, you can establish relations with the best of them
which they will find it very hard to break. But, if they wish to employ
another person, who, as they think, knows more than you do, do not take
it as a personal wrong. A patient believes another man can save his
life, can restore him to health, which, as he thinks, you have not the
skill to do. No matter whether the patient is right or wrong, it is a
great impertinence to think you have any property in him. Your estimate
of your own ability is not the question, it is what the patient thinks
of it. All your wisdom is to him like the lady's virtue in Raleigh's
song:

"If she seem not chaste to me,
What care I how chaste she be?"

What I call a good patient is one who, having found a good physician,
sticks to him till he dies. But there are many very good people who are
not what I call good patients. I was once requested to call on a
lady suffering from nervous and other symptoms. It came out in the
preliminary conversational skirmish, half medical, half social, that
I was the twenty-sixth member of the faculty into whose arms,
professionally speaking, she had successively thrown herself. Not
being a believer in such a rapid rotation of scientific crops, I gently
deposited the burden, commending it to the care of number twenty-seven,
and, him, whoever he might be, to the care of Heaven.

If there happened to be among my audience any person who wished to know
on what principles the patient should choose his physician, I should
give him these few precep