We do not guess, we know that 9 in 10 of the species are pudd’nheads.  We know it by various evidences; and one of them is, that for ages the race has respected (and almost venerated) the physician’s grotesque system—­the emptying of miscellaneous and harmful drugs into a person’s stomach to remove ailments which in many cases the drugs could not reach at all; in many cases could reach and help, but only at cost of damage to some other part of the man; and in the remainder of the cases the drug either retarded the cure, or the disease was cured by nature in spite of the nostrums.  The doctor’s insane system has not only been permitted to continue its follies for ages, but has been protected by the State and made a close monopoly—­an infamous thing, a crime against a free-man’s proper right to choose his own assassin or his own method of defending his body against disease and death.

And yet at the same time, with curious and senile inconsistency, the State has allowed the man to choose his own assassin—­in one detail—­the patent-medicine detail—­making itself the protector of that perilous business, collecting money out of it, and appointing no committee of experts to examine the medicines and forbid them when extra dangerous.  Really, when a man can prove that he is not a jackass, I think he is in the way to prove that he is no legitimate member of the race.

I have by me a list of 52 human ailments—­common ones—­and in this list I count 19 which the physician’s art cannot cure.  But there isn’t one which Osteopathy or Kellgren cannot cure, if the patient comes early.

Fifteen years ago I had a deep reverence for the physician and the surgeon.  But 6 months of closely watching the Kellgren business has revolutionized all that, and now I have neither reverence nor respect for the physician’s trade, and scarcely any for the surgeon’s,—­I am convinced that of all quackeries, the physician’s is the grotesquest and the silliest.  And they know they are shams and humbugs.  They have taken the place of those augurs who couldn’t look each other in the face without laughing.

See what a powerful hold our ancient superstitions have upon us:  two weeks ago, when Livy committed an incredible imprudence and by consequence was promptly stricken down with a heavy triple attack —­influenza, bronchitis, and a lung affected—­she recognized the gravity of the situation, and her old superstitions rose:  she thought she ought to send for a doctor—­Think of it—­the last man in the world I should want around at such a time.  Of course I did not say no—­not that I was indisposed to take the responsibility, for I was not, my notion of a dangerous responsibility being quite the other way—­but because it is unsafe to distress a sick person; I only said we knew no good doctor, and it could not be good policy to choose at hazard; so she allowed me to send for Kellgren.  To-day she is up and around—­cured.  It is safe to say that persons hit in the same way at the same time are in bed yet, and booked to stay there a good while, and to be in a shackly condition and afraid of their shadows for a couple of years or more to come.