No,—­the doctors owe nothing to climate or race.  The intelligent ones are everywhere broad, acute, tender, and religious.  They uniformly see what is natural and what is morbid, what is fact and what is fancy, what is cutaneous and what is vital, in men and women.  They stand on unreal, conventional terms with nothing.  They know healthy from inflamed tissues, and run down, grab, and give one dexterous fatal shake to a tissue of lies.  One of Dr. Brown’s terriers is not more swift, exact, and uncompromising after vermin.  This excellent sense for unvarnished realities has been attributed by some to their habit of visiting so many interiors—­of men and of their houses—­whose swell-fronts are pervious to the sincerity of pain.  We never see a doctor’s chaise anchored at a door but we imagine the doctor taking in freight up-stairs.  In these days he is beginning to receive more than he gives.  Let no sarcastic person allude to doctors’ fees.  We mean that the physician, whose humanity and intelligence are broad diplomas, on presenting which the doors of hearts and houses open with a welcome, enters into the choicest field of his education and research, where his tender observation walks the wards of thought, feeling, and motive, to amass the facts of health and suffering, to be refined at the true drama of pathos, to be ennobled by the spectacle of fair and lofty spiritual traits, to be advised of the weaknesses which he learns to touch lightly with his caustic, while his knowing and friendly look deprecates all excess of pain.  It is a school of shrewdness, gentleness, and faith.

But a rich subject is here, altogether too wide for a book-notice, and worthy of deliberate, but enthusiastic treatment.  Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh has consulted his own interior, and frequented those of his diocese, to some purpose.  The pieces in this volume, which the publishers have selected from the two volumes of “Horae Subsecivae,” omitting the more professional papers, are full of humor, tenderness, and common sense.  They betray only occasionally, in a technical way, that the author is a disciple, as well as admirer, of Sydenham, and his own countryman, Cullen.  But they overflow with the best specifics of the healing art, shrewdness, independence, nice observation; they have a woman’s kindness and a man’s sturdiness.  They honor human nature not the less because the writer knows how to manage it, to raise a smile at its absurdities, to rally, pique, and guide it into health and good-humor.  He is very clever with the edge-tools in his surgeon’s-case; he whips you out an excrescence before you are quite aware that he meditated an operation, and you find that he had chloroformed you with a shrewd writer’s best anaesthetic, a humorous and genial temper.