, consumptives, and so on? For instance, that unhappy girl, half
dead, and covered with sweat--would you have bathed her?"

"Certainly not! There are heroic methods of treatment to which, in
practice, one does not dare to have recourse. An icy bath may undoubtedly
kill a consumptive; but do we know, whether, in certain circumstances, it
might not save her? I, who have ended by admitting that a supernatural
power is at work here, I willingly admit that some cures must take place
under natural conditions, thanks to that immersion in cold water which
seems to us idiotic and barbarous. Ah! the things we don't know, the
things we don't know!"

He was relapsing into his anger, his hatred of science, which he scorned
since it had left him scared and powerless beside the deathbed of his
wife and his daughter. "You ask for certainties," he resumed, "but
assuredly it is not medicine which will give you them. Listen for a
moment to those gentlemen and you will be edified. Is it not beautiful,
all that confusion in which so many opinions clash together? Certainly
there are ailments with which one is thoroughly acquainted, even to the
most minute details of their evolution; there are remedies also, the
effects of which have been studied with the most scrupulous care; but the
thing that one does not know, that one cannot know, is the relation of
the remedy to the ailment, for there are as many cases as there may be
patients, each liable to variation, so that experimentation begins afresh
every time. This is why the practice of medicine remains an art, for
there can be no experimental finality in it. Cure always depends on
chance, on some fortunate circumstance, on some bright idea of the
doctor's. And so you will understand that all the people who come and
discuss here make me laugh when they talk about the absolute laws of
science. Where are those laws in medicine? I should like to have them
shown to me."

He did not wish to say any more, but his passion carried him away, so he
went on: "I told you that I had become a believer--nevertheless, to speak
the truth, I understand very well why this worthy Doctor Bonamy is so
little affected, and why he continues calling upon doctors in all parts
of the world to come and study his miracles. The more doctors that might
come, the less likelihood there would be of the truth being established
in the inevitable battle between contradictory diagnoses and methods of
treatment. If men cannot agr