present symptoms or to enable the
growing disorder to spell itself out for us, as it were, letter by
letter, until its nature becomes clear. The practice is harmless, but
there is, of course, a better way, if we possess the entire confidence
of the patient or his friends. But sometimes it is undesirable to give
explanations until they can be securely correct, or haply the sick man
is too ill to receive them. Then we are apt, and wisely, to treat some
dominant symptom, and to wait until the disease assumes definite shape.
So it is that much of what we thus give is mild enough. The restless
mother is the cause with some doctors of much of this use of mere
harmless medicines. I once expressed surprise in a consultation that an
aged physician, who had called me in, should be so desirous of doing
something, when I as earnestly wished to wait. At last he said, "Doctor,
it is not the child I want to dose; it is the mother's mind." Perhaps
the anecdote may not be lost on some too solicitous woman, who naturally
desires that the doctor should be doing something just when he is most
anxious to be doing nothing.

Men yet live who can remember when all of our knowledge of disease was
acquired by the unaided use of the eye, the ear, and the touch. The
physician felt the pulse, and judged of fever by the sense of warmth. He
looked at the skin and tongue and the secretions, and formed
conclusions, more or less just in proportion to the educated acuteness
of his senses and the use he made of these accumulations of experience.
The shrewdness of the judgments thus formed shows us, to our wonder, how
sharply he must have trained his senses, and has led some to suspect
that our easier and more exact methods and means may have led us to
bestow less care in observation than did these less aided and less
fortunate students. The conclusion is, I am sure, erroneous, and I am
confident that the more refined the means the more do they train us to
exactness in all directions, so that even what we now do with the eye,
ear, or hand alone is better and more carefully done than when the
senses had none of the training due to the use of instruments of
precision. I may add that the results of their employment have also made
it easy in many cases to dispense with them, and to interpret readily
what has been won by the unassisted sense.

The history of precision in medicine is worth the telling, if only to
teach the lay reader something of that vast stru