This same community is very intelligent with respect to a great many subjects-commerce, mechanics, manufactures, politics.  But with regard to medicine it is hopelessly ignorant and never finds it out.  I do not know that it is any worse in this country than in Great Britain, where Mr. Huxley speaks very freely of “the utter ignorance of the simplest laws of their own animal life, which prevails among even the most highly educated persons.”  And Cullen said before him “Neither the acutest genius nor the soundest judgment will avail in judging of a particular science, in regard to which they have not been exercised.  I have been obliged to please my patients sometimes with reasons, and I have found that any will pass, even with able divines and acute lawyers; the same will pass with the husbands as with the wives.”  If the community could only be made aware of its own utter ignorance, and incompetence to form opinions on medical subjects, difficult enough to those who give their lives to the study of them, the practitioner would have an easier task.  But it will form opinions of its own, it cannot help it, and we cannot blame it, even though we know how slight and deceptive are their foundations.

This is the way it happens:  Every grown-up person has either been ill himself or had a friend suffer from illness, from which he has recovered.  Every sick person has done something or other by somebody’s advice, or of his own accord, a little before getting better.  There is an irresistible tendency to associate the thing done, and the improvement which followed it, as cause and effect.  This is the great source of fallacy in medical practice.  But the physician has some chance of correcting his hasty inference.  He thinks his prescription cured a single case of a particular complaint; he tries it in twenty similar cases without effect, and sets down the first as probably nothing more than a coincidence.  The unprofessional experimenter or observer has no large experience to correct his hasty generalization.  He wants to believe that the means he employed effected his cure.  He feels grateful to the person who advised it, he loves to praise the pill or potion which helped him, and he has a kind of monumental pride in himself as a living testimony to its efficacy.  So it is that you will find the community in which you live, be it in town or country, full of brands plucked from the burning, as they believe, by some agency which, with your better training, you feel reasonably confident had nothing to do with it.  Their disease went out of itself, and the stream from the medical fire-annihilator had never even touched it.

You cannot and need not expect to disturb the public in the possession of its medical superstitions.  A man’s ignorance is as much his private property, and as precious in his own eyes, as his family Bible.  You have only to open your own Bible at the ninth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, and you will find that the logic of a restored patient was very simple then, as it is now, and very hard to deal with.  My clerical friends will forgive me for poaching on their sacred territory, in return for an occasional raid upon the medical domain of which they have now and then been accused.