my own, the so-called
"old school," or Allopathic, the more dangerous he is to the curing
efforts of Nature.

With the people the disease is simply an attack, and not the summing up
of the results of violated laws going on perhaps from birth. With the
people the symptoms are merely evidences of destruction, and not the
visible efforts to restore the normal condition. Hence the failures to
relieve always raise more or less questioning, among friends in painful
concern, as to the ability of the physician to discharge his grave
duties.

This unreasoning, unreasonable "blind faith" in remedial means is as
strong in the most intelligent as in the most ignorant, and it has ever
given me more trouble than the care of the sick. Another serious
complication of the sick-room arises from near-by friends who are very
certain that their own physicians are better fitted by far for the
serious work of prescribing for the sick.

In addition to the serious work of attacking the symptoms of disease as
so many foes to life, there is also a care as to what unbidden food
shall go into unbidden stomachs, that the system shall be supported
while life seems to be in the hands of its greatest enemy.

The universal conception of disease as a foe to life, and not as a
rational process of cure; the boundless faith in remedies as means to
resist the attack, revealed by symptoms, makes the professional care of
the sick the gravest of all human occupations, and the most trying to
both head and heart.

With all these taxing conditions confronting me, I opened an office in a
field which seemed to be more than occupied by men of large experience.

With all my army experience I still had a hazy conception as to Nature
in disease. That the vital forces needed the support of all the food the
stomach of the sick could dispose of, was not a question of the remotest
consideration. That medicine did in some way act to cure disease I could
not fully question.

I was now to enter a service in which, from the care of infancy in its
first breathings to old age in its last, every resource of the materia
medica, of the reason, judgment, and of the soul itself, was to be
called in in every grave case, and to be held to a responsibility
measured by preposterous faith in medicines.

I entered upon my duties with a determination to win professional
success by the most thorough attention to all the details of service
upon the sick and their friends, and I conf