ined my efforts almost wholly
to acute cases. None of my professional colleagues were winning laurels
by the treatment of chronic diseases, and not having faith in drugs for
such I had my scruples about fees for failures that seemed inevitable.

And yet with the most painstaking service fortune would play with me at
times in the most heartless manner. At one time four of my adult
patients were awaiting burial within the radius of a half mile. As they
were all physical wrecks, and died after short illnesses, there could be
no question raised in any just sense as to the character of my services,
but the fatalities were scored against me. Such fortune would be
annihilating but for the fatalities inevitable with all practitioners.

For full ten years I visited the sick and dosed them according to the
books, but with far less force of hands and faith than any of my
brethren, and all were enjoined to take nourishment to keep up the
strength for the combat with disease.

My doses were confined to only a few Sampsons of the materia medica, and
these were administered with a watching for favorable results that could
hardly be surpassed, and yet always with disappointment.

I was innocent enough to believe that a large practice could only be
built up by the most painstaking and persistent effort; later on I found
that a large practice was but little dependent upon the skill and
learning displayed in the sick-room. One physician could immediately
secure a large patronage because she was a woman; another, because he
belonged to this or that nationality, or there was something in the
personal outfit rather than in the professional that incited large hopes
for the ailing.

In all my cases of acute sickness there was always a wasting of the body
no matter how much they were fed; a like increase of general strength
when a normal desire for food occurred no matter how little they were
fed. I saw this with eyesight only; but I saw with insight that a large
practice could be carried on by doctors too ignorant to know that there
was an alphabet in medical science.

I was not then so fully aware of the depths of ignorance among the
people as to what cures disease, did not know that faith in doses was so
large, as child-like even with the most cultured as with the ignorant. I
was not so well aware, as I became later, that the physician himself
must have such energy of faith in the materia medica as to reveal it in
every line of his cou