ts to think over:

Choose a man who is personally agreeable, for a daily visit from an
intelligent, amiable, pleasant, sympathetic person will cost you no more
than one from a sloven or a boor, and his presence will do more for you
than any prescription the other will order.

Let him be a man of recognized good sense in other matters, and the
chance is that he will be sensible as a practitioner.

Let him be a man who stands well with his professional brethren, whom
they approve as honest, able, courteous.

Let him be one whose patients are willing to die in his hands, not one
whom they go to for trifles, and leave as soon as they are in danger,
and who can say, therefore, that he never loses a patient.

Do not leave the ranks of what is called the regular profession, unless
you wish to go farther and fare worse, for you may be assured that
its members recognize no principle which hinders their accepting any
remedial agent proved to be useful, no matter from what quarter it
comes. The difficulty is that the stragglers, organized under fantastic
names in pretentious associations, or lurking in solitary dens behind
doors left ajar, make no real contributions to the art of healing. When
they bring forward a remedial agent like chloral, like the bromide
of potassium, like ether, used as an anesthetic, they will find no
difficulty in procuring its recognition.

Some of you will probably be more or less troubled by the pretensions
of that parody of mediaeval theology which finds its dogma of hereditary
depravity in the doctrine of psora, its miracle of transubstantiation in
the mystery of its triturations and dilutions, its church in the people
who have mistaken their century, and its priests in those who have
mistaken their calling. You can do little with persons who are disposed
to accept these curious medical superstitions. The saturation-point
of individual minds with reference to evidence, and especially medical
evidence, differs, and must always continue to differ, very widely.
There are those whose minds are satisfied with the decillionth dilution
of a scientific proof. No wonder they believe in the efficacy of a
similar attenuation of bryony or pulsatilla. You have no fulcrum you
can rest upon to lift an error out of such minds as these, often highly
endowed with knowledge and talent, sometimes with genius, but commonly
richer in the imaginative than the observing and reasoning faculties.

Let me return once mor