e was invaluable. I have since found that my greatest
service at the beds of the sick is as an interpreter of symptoms rather
than a vender of drugs. The friends of the sick read indications for
good or bad with wonderful acuteness, as a rule; and I have rarely found
myself mistaken in my ability to read the condition of patients in the
faces of the friends, even before I enter the rooms of the sick.

As my experience enlarged so did my faith in Nature; and, since there
was no similarity in the quality, sizes, and times of the doses for like
diseases, my faith in mere remedies gradually declined.

After a year and a half of large opportunities to study the diseases of
men in the early prime of life, in the care of the simple surgery of
shot and shell, I left the army with such familiarity with grave
diseases and death in various forms as to enable me ever after to retain
complete self-possession in the presence of dying beds in private
practice.

I began the general practice of medicine in Meadville in the autumn of
1866. Among the many physicians located in the city at that time were
men of ability and large experience. There were those who administered
with sublime faith doses too small for mathematical estimate; those who
with equal faith administered boluses to the throat's capacity for
deglutition; those who fully believed in whiskey as nourishment, that
milk is liquid food, and who with tremendous faith and forceful hands
administered both until human stomachs were reduced to barren wastes and
death would result from starvation aggravated by disease.

Most of the cases of disease that fall to the care of the physician are
trivial, self-limited, and rapidly recover under even the most
crucifying dosages; Nature really winning the victories, the physician
carrying off the honors.

This is so nearly true that it may be stated that, aside from the domain
of surgery, professional success in the general sense depends upon the
personal qualities and character of the physician rather than the
achievements of the materia medica.

People have a confidence in the power of medicine to cure disease
scarcely less than the dusky warrior has in the Indian medicine-lodge of
the Western wilderness, and a confidence about as void of reason.

The physician goes into the rooms of the sick held to the severest
accountability in the matter of dosage; and the larger his own faith in
medicines the greater his task; and, if he is of