s Sir Andrew
Clark, Mr. Gladstone's great physician. He was a Scotchman greatly
beloved, and always with a huge following to whom he imparted far more
valuable truths than even the medical science of thirty years ago
afforded. His constant message, repeated and repeated at the risk of
wearying, was: "Gentlemen, you must observe for yourselves. It is your
observation and not your memory which counts. It is the patient and
not the disease whom you are treating."

Compared with the methods of diagnosis to-day those then were very
limited, but Sir Andrew's message was the more important, showing the
greatness of the man, who, though at the very top of the tree, never
for a moment tried to convey to his followers that his knowledge was
final, but that any moment he stood ready to abandon his position for
a better one. On one occasion, to illustrate this point, while he was
in one of the largest of our wards (one with four divisions and twenty
beds each) he was examining a lung case, while a huge class of fifty
young doctors stood around.

"What about the sputum, Mr. Jones?" he asked. "What have you observed
coming from these lungs?"

"There is not much quantity, sir. It is greenish in colour."

"But what about the microscope, Mr. Jones? What does that show?"

"No examination has been made, sir."

"Gentlemen," he said, "I will now go to the other ward, and you shall
choose a specimen of the sputum of some of these cases. When I return
we will examine it and see what we can learn."

When he returned, four specimens awaited him, the history and
diagnoses of the cases being known only to the class. The class never
forgot how by dissolving and boiling, and with the microscope, he told
us almost more from his examination of each case than we knew from all
our other information. His was real teaching, and reminds one of the
Glasgow professor who, in order to emphasize the same point of the
value of observation, prepared a little cupful of kerosene, mustard,
and castor oil, and calling the attention of his class to it, dipped a
finger into the atrocious compound and then sucked his finger. He then
passed the mixture around to the students who all did the same with
most dire results. When the cup returned and he observed the faces of
his students, he remarked: "Gentlemen, I am afraid you did not use
your powers of obsairvation. The finger that I put into the cup was no
the same one that I stuck in my mouth afterwards."

Sir