be a less objectionable arrangement than this other most pernicious one.  He would naturally think twice before he gave an emetic or cathartic which evacuated his own pocket, and be sparing of the cholagogues that emptied the biliary ducts of his own wallet, unless he were sure they were needed.  If there is any temptation, it should not be in favor of giving noxious agents, as it clearly must be in the case of English druggists and “General Practitioners.”  The complaint against the other course is a very old one.  Pliny, inspired with as truly Roman horror of quackery as the elder Cato,—­who declared that the Greek doctors had sworn to exterminate all barbarians, including the Romans, with their drugs, but is said to have physicked his own wife to death, notwithstanding,—­Pliny says, in so many words, that the cerates and cataplasms, plasters, collyria, and antidotes, so abundant in his time, as in more recent days, were mere tricks to make money.

A pretty strong eddy, then, or rather many eddies, setting constantly back from the current of sober observation of nature, in the direction of old superstitions and fancies, of exploded theories, of old ways of making money, which are very slow to pass out of fashion.

But there are other special American influences which we are bound to take cognizance of.  If I wished to show a student the difficulties of getting at truth from medical experience, I would give him the history of epilepsy to read.  If I wished him to understand the tendencies of the American medical mind, its sanguine enterprise, its self-confidence, its audacious handling of Nature, its impatience with her old-fashioned ways of taking time to get a sick man well, I would make him read the life and writings of Benjamin Rush.  Dr. Rush thought and said that there were twenty times more intellect and a hundred times more knowledge in the country in 1799 than before the Revolution.  His own mind was in a perpetual state of exaltation produced by the stirring scenes in which he had taken a part, and the quickened life of the time in which he lived.  It was not the state to favor sound, calm observation.  He was impatient, and Nature is profoundly imperturbable.  We may adjust the beating of our hearts to her pendulum if we will and can, but we may be very sure that she will not change the pendulum’s rate of going because our hearts are palpitating.  He thought he had mastered yellow-fever.  “Thank God,” he said, “out of one hundred patients whom I have visited or prescribed for this day, I have lost none.”  Where was all his legacy of knowledge when Norfolk was decimated?  Where was it when the blue flies were buzzing over the coffins of the unburied dead piled up in the cemetery of New Orleans, at the edge of the huge trenches yawning to receive them?