and
decided that the poor wretch's torture should be needlessly prolonged by
a course of moxas. I timidly remarked that it would be simpler to send
for a confessor, and then assuage the sufferings of the dying man with
repeated injections of morphine. If you had seen their faces! They came
as near as anything to denouncing me as a tout for the priests.

"And such is contemporary science. Everybody discovers a new or
forgotten disease, and trumpets a forgotten or a new remedy, and nobody
knows a thing! And then, too, what good does it do one not to be
hopelessly ignorant since there is so much sophistication going on in
pharmacy that no physician can be sure of having his prescriptions
filled to the letter? One example among many: at present, sirup of white
poppy, the diacodia of the old Codex, does not exist. It is manufactured
with laudanum and sirup of sugar, as if they were the same thing!

"We have got so we no longer dose substances but prescribe ready-made
remedies and use those surprising specifics which fill up the fourth
pages of the journals. It's a compromise medicine, a democratic
medicine, one cure for all cases. It's scandalous, it's silly.

"No, there is no use in talking. The old therapeutics based on
experience was better than this. At least it know that remedies ingested
in pill, powder, or bolus form were treacherous, so it prescribed them
only in the liquid state. Now, too, every physician specializes. The
oculists see only the eyes, and, to cure them, quite calmly poison the
body. With their pilocarpine they have ruined the health of how many
people for ever! Others treat cutaneous affections. They drive an eczema
inward on an old man who as soon as he is 'cured' becomes childish or
dangerous. There is no more solidarity. Allegiance to one party means
hostility to all others. Its a mess. Now my honourable confreres are
stumbling around, taking a fancy to medicaments which they don't even
know how to use. Take antipyrine, for example. It is one of the very few
really active products that the chemists have found in a long time.
Well, where is the doctor who knows that, applied in a compress with
iodide and cold Bondonneau spring water, antipyrine combats the
supposedly incurable ailment, cancer? And if that seems incredible, it
is true, nevertheless."

"Honestly," said Durtal, "you believe that the old-time doctors came
nearer healing?"

"Yes, because, miraculously, they know the effects of cert