Most people know little or nothing of these beasts, until all at once they find themselves attacked by one of them.  They are therefore liable to be frightened by those that are not dangerous, and careless with those that are destructive.  They do not know what will soothe, and what will exasperate them.  They do not even know the dens of many of them, though they are close to their own dwellings.

A physician is one that has lived among these beasts, and studied their aspects and habits.  He knows them all well, and looks them in the face, and lays his hand on their backs daily.  They seem, as it were, to know him, and to greet him with such risus sardonicus as they can muster.  He knows that his friends and himself have all got to be eaten up at last by them, and his friends have the same belief.  Yet they want him near them at all times, and with them when they are set upon by any of these their natural enemies.  He goes, knowing pretty well what he can do and what he cannot.

He can talk to them in a quiet and sensible way about these terrible beings, concerning which they are so ignorant, and liable to harbor such foolish fancies.  He can frighten away some of the lesser kind of animals with certain ill-smelling preparations he carries about him.  Once in a while he can draw the teeth of some of the biggest, or throttle them.  He can point out their dens, and so keep many from falling into their jaws.

This is a great deal to promise or perform, but it is not all that is expected of him.  Sick people are very apt to be both fools and cowards.  Many of them confess the fact in the frankest possible way.  If you doubt it, ask the next dentist about the wisdom and courage of average manhood under the dispensation of a bad tooth.  As a tooth is to a liver, so are the dentists’ patients to the doctors’, in the want of the two excellences above mentioned.

Those not over-wise human beings called patients are frequently a little unreasonable.  They come with a small scratch, which Nature will heal very nicely in a few days, and insist on its being closed at once with some kind of joiner’s glue.  They want their little coughs cured, so that they may breathe at their ease, when they have no lungs left that are worth mentioning.  They would have called in Luke the physician to John the Baptist, when his head was in the charger, and asked for a balsam that would cure cuts.  This kind of thing cannot be done.  But it is very profitable to lie about it, and say that it can be done.  The people who make a business of this lying, and profiting by it, are called quacks.

—­But as patients wish to believe in all manner of “cures,” and as all doctors love to believe in the power of their remedies and as nothing is more open to self-deception than medical experience, the whole matter of therapeutics has always been made a great deal more of than the case would justify.  It has been an inflated currency,—­fifty pretences on paper, to one fact of true, ringing metal.