ll of his own patients.

By the time this preface is in print the kaleidoscope may have had
another shake; and opsonin may have gone the way of phlogiston at the
hands of its own restless discoverer. I will not say that Hahnemann may
have gone the way of Diafoirus; for Diafoirus we have always with us.
But we shall still pick up all our knowledge in pursuit of some Will o'
the Wisp or other. What is called science has always pursued the Elixir
of Life and the Philosopher's Stone, and is just as busy after them
to-day as ever it was in the days of Paracelsus. We call them by
different names: Immunization or Radiology or what not; but the dreams
which lure us into the adventures from which we learn are always at
bottom the same. Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that
it has reached its goal. What is wrong with priests and popes is that
instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics
who say "I know" instead of "I am learning," and pray for credulity and
inertia as wise men pray for scepticism and activity. Such abominations
as the Inquisition and the Vaccination Acts are possible only in the
famine years of the soul, when the great vital dogmas of honor, liberty,
courage, the kinship of all life, faith that the unknown is greater than
the known and is only the As Yet Unknown, and resolution to find a
manly highway to it, have been forgotten in a paroxysm of littleness and
terror in which nothing is active except concupiscence and the fear of
death, playing on which any trader can filch a fortune, any blackguard
gratify his cruelty, and any tyrant make us his slaves.

Lest this should seem too rhetorical a conclusion for our professional
men of science, who are mostly trained not to believe anything unless it
is worded in the jargon of those writers who, because they never really
understand what they are trying to say, cannot find familiar words for
it, and are therefore compelled to invent a new language of nonsense
for every book they write, let me sum up my conclusions as dryly as is
consistent with accurate thought and live conviction.

1. Nothing is more dangerous than a poor doctor: not even a poor
employer or a poor landlord.

2. Of all the anti-social vested interests the worst is the vested
interest in ill-health.

3. Remember that an illness is a misdemeanor; and treat the doctor as an
accessory unless he notifies every case to the Public Health authority.

4. Treat every d