ong the charlatan will
keep his hold on the ignorant public. So long as it exists, the wisest
practitioner will be liable to deceive himself about the effect of
what he calls and loves to think are his remedies. Long-continued and
sagacious observation will to some extent undeceive him; but were it not
for the happy illusion that his useless or even deleterious drugs were
doing good service, many a practitioner would give up his calling for
one in which he could be more certain that he was really being useful to
the subjects of his professional dealings. For myself, I should prefer
a physician of a sanguine temperament, who had a firm belief in himself
and his methods. I do not wonder at all that the public support a whole
community of pretenders who show the portraits of the patients they have
"cured." The best physicians will tell you that, though many patients
get well under their treatment, they rarely cure anybody. If you are
told also that the best physician has many more patients die on his
hands than the worst of his fellow-practitioners, you may add these two
statements to your bundle of paradoxes, and if they puzzle you I will
explain them at some future time.

[I take this opportunity of correcting a statement now going the rounds
of the medical and probably other periodicals. In "The Journal of
the American Medical Association," dated April 26,1890, published at
Chicago, I am reported, in quotation marks, as saying, "Give me opium,
wine, and milk, and I will cure all diseases to which flesh is heir."

In the first place, I never said I will cure, or can cure, or would or
could cure, or had cured any disease. My venerated instructor, Dr. James
Jackson, taught me never to use that expression. Curo means, I take care
of, he used to say, and in that sense, if you mean nothing more, it is
properly employed. So, in the amphitheatre of the Ecole de Medecine,
I used to read the words of Ambroise Pare, "Je le pansay, Dieu le
guarist." (I dressed his wound, and God cured him.) Next, I am not in
the habit of talking about "the diseases to which flesh is heir." The
expression has become rather too familiar for repetition, and belongs
to the rhetoric of other latitudes. And, lastly, I have said some
plain things, perhaps some sharp ones, about the abuse of drugs and the
limited number of vitally important remedies, but I am not so ignorantly
presumptuous as to make the foolish statement falsely attributed to me.]

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