ed for life by it. People
often say how difficult the excitable temperament is to manage. I say
how difficult is the _accumulative_ temperament. With the first you have
an out-break which you could anticipate, and it is all over. With the
second you never know where you are--you never know when the
consequences are over. And it requires your closest observation to know
what _are_ the consequences of what--for the consequent by no means
follows immediately upon the antecedent--and coarse observation is
utterly at fault.

[Sidenote: Superstition the fruit of bad observation.]

Almost all superstitions are owing to bad observation, to the _post hoc,
ergo propter hoc_; and bad observers are almost all superstitious.
Farmers used to attribute disease among cattle to witchcraft; weddings
have been attributed to seeing one magpie, deaths to seeing three; and I
have heard the most highly educated now-a-days draw consequences for the
sick closely resembling these.

[Sidenote: Physiognomy of disease little shown by the face.]

Another remark: although there is unquestionably a physiognomy of
disease as well as of health; of all parts of the body, the face is
perhaps the one which tells the least to the common observer or the
casual visitor. Because, of all parts of the body, it is the one most
exposed to other influences, besides health. And people never, or
scarcely ever, observe enough to know how to distinguish between the
effect of exposure, of robust health, of a tender skin, of a tendency to
congestion, of suffusion, flushing, or many other things. Again, the
face is often the last to shew emaciation. I should say that the hand
was a much surer test than the face, both as to flesh, colour,
circulation, &c., &c. It is true that there are _some_ diseases which
are only betrayed at all by something in the face, e.g., the eye or
the tongue, as great irritability of brain by the appearance of the
pupil of the eye. But we are talking of casual, not minute, observation.
And few minute observers will hesitate to say that far more untruth than
truth is conveyed by the oft repeated words, He _looks_ well, or ill, or
better or worse.

Wonderful is the way in which people will go upon the slightest
observation, or often upon no observation at all, or upon some _saw_
which the world's experience, if it had any, would have pronounced
utterly false long ago.

I have known patients dying of sheer pain, exhaustion, and want of
sleep