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with all the baths and waters, the hotels and lodging-houses throughout the world, or familiar with the barbarous names and pretended virtues of all the advertised nostrums that deface the fair English fields from London to Oxford. The public suppose that it is their business to know what is the matter, and the doctor’s to find the remedy; if so, our art would be confined to learning the name of the patient’s disorder by letter, post-card, or telegram, and looking up in an index of remedies the twenty or thirty drugs which are “good” for that particular complaint. We know that the real difficulty is to ascertain the nature and origin of our patient’s disorder; when that is done, the treatment in most cases is obvious, and in many effectual; when it is not done, our treatment is vacillating, and either futile or mischievous. We have already ample means at our disposal for influencing almost every organ of the body. A
