The respectable age and character of your venerable patient leads me to regret that it is not in my power to suggest a remedy for the cure of the disorder you have described in her breast.  I know nothing of the root that you mention as found in Carolina and Georgia, but, from a variety of inquiries and experiments, I am disposed to believe that there does not exist in the vegetable kingdom an antidote to cancers.  All the vegetable remedies I have heard of are composed of some mineral caustics.  The arsenic is the most powerful of any of them.  It is the basis of Dr. Martin’s powder.  I have used it in many cases with some success, but have failed in some.  From your account of Mrs. Washington’s breast, I am afraid no great good can be expected from the use of it.  Perhaps it may cleanse it, and thereby retard its spreading.  You may try it diluted in water.  Continue the application of opium and camphor, and wash it frequently with a decoction of red clover.  Give anodynes when necessary, and support the system with bark and wine.  Under this treatment she may live comfortably many years, and finally die of old age.”

He had here to deal with cancer, a disease which he knew to be incurable.  His experience taught him, however, that in the very old this malady is slow and measured in its march, and that he could only aid and not cure.  What he says might with slight change have been penned to-day.  We have gone no further in helpfulness as regards this sad disease.

If what I write now is to have for the laity any value, it will be in correcting certain of their judgments as to physicians, and in suggesting to them some of the tests which will enable them to exercise a reasonable judgment as to those in whose hands they place so often without a thought the issues of life and death and the earthly fates of their dearest.

I began, somewhat discursively, by showing how much care the masters of my art gave even in past days to matters of diet and modes of life.  This is still to-day a test of larger applicability.  There are those of my profession who have a credulity about the action of drugs, a belief in their supreme control and exactness of effect which amounts to superstition, and fills many of us with amazement.  This form of idolatry is at times the dull-witted child of laziness, or it is a queer form of self-esteem, which sets the idol of self-made opinion on too firm a base to be easily shaken by the rudeness of facts.  But, if you watched these men, you would find them changing their idols.  Such too profound belief in mere drugs is apt, especially in the lazy thinker, to give rise to neglect of more natural aids, and these tendencies are strengthened and helped by the dislike of most patients to follow a schedule of life, and by the comfort they seem to find in substituting three pills a day for a troublesome obedience to strict rules of diet, of exercise, and of work.