representatives of the various priesthoods,
but in their too credulous--or shall we say, too faithful patients?
--the representatives of all sects. There is, for example, the
superstitious vulgar in medicine,--the gross worshipper of the
Fetish, who believes in the efficacy of charm, and spell, and
incantation, of mere ceremonial and opus operatum; then there
is the polytheist, who will adore any thing in the shape of a drug,
and who is continually quacking himself with some nostrum or other
from morning to night; who not only takes his regular physician's
prescriptions, but has his household gods of empirical remedies,
to which he applies with equal devotion. Then there is the Romanist
in medicine, who swears by the infallibility of some papal Abernethy,
and the unfailing efficacy of some viaticum of a blue pill."

"And who," said I, "would represent our friend who has just left the
room, and who has tried every thing?"

"Why," he replied, "I think he is in the condition of a little boy
of whom I heard a little while ago, whose mother was a homoeopathist,
and kept a little chest, from which she dispensed to her family and
friends, perhaps as skilfully as the doctor himself could have
done. The little fellow, going into her dressing-room, opened this
box, and, thinking that he had fallen on a score of 'millions' (as
children call them), swallowed up his mother's whole doctor's shop
before he could be stopped. It was happy, said the doctor, when called
in, that the little patient had swallowed so many, or he would have
been infallibly killed. Or perhaps we may liken our friend to that
humorous traveller, Mr. Stephens, who tells us, that, having been
provided at Cairo, by a skilful physician there, with a number of
remedies for some serious complaint to which he was subject, found,
to his dismay, when suffering under a severe paroxysm in the fortress
of Akaba, that he had lost the directions which told him in what order
the medicines were to be taken. Whether pill, powder, or draught was
to come first, he knew not: 'on which,' says he, 'in a fit of
desperation, I placed them all in a row before me, and resolved to
swallow them all serialim till I obtained relief.' George has
equal faith."

"You have omitted," said I, "one character,--that of the sceptic, who
believes in no medicine at all; who sturdily dies with his doubts
unresolved, and unattended by any physician. But it must be confessed
that he is a still rarer c