“So it would have done,
   At the same season, if your mother’s cat
   Had kittened, though yourself had ne’er been born.”

You must listen more meekly than Hotspur did to the babbling Welshman, for ignorance is a solemn and sacred fact, and, like infancy, which it resembles, should be respected.  Once in a while you will have a patient of sense, born with the gift of observation, from whom you may learn something.  When you find yourself in the presence of one who is fertile of medical opinions, and affluent in stories of marvellous cures,—­of a member of Congress whose name figures in certificates to the value of patent medicines, of a voluble dame who discourses on the miracles she has wrought or seen wrought with the little jokers of the sugar-of-milk globule-box, take out your watch and count the pulse; also note the time of day, and charge the price of a visit for every extra fifteen, or, if you are not very busy, every twenty minutes.  In this way you will turn what seems a serious dispensation into a double blessing, for this class of patients loves dearly to talk, and it does them a deal of good, and you feel as if you had earned your money by the dose you have taken, quite as honestly as by any dose you may have ordered.

You must take the community just as it is, and make the best of it.  You wish to obtain its confidence; there is a short rule for doing this which you will find useful,—­deserve it.  But, to deserve it in full measure, you must unite many excellences, natural and acquired.

As the basis of all the rest, you must have all those traits of character which fit you to enter into the most intimate and confidential relations with the families of which you are the privileged friend and counsellor.  Medical Christianity, if I may use such a term, is of very early date.  By the oath of Hippocrates, the practitioner of ancient times bound himself to enter his patient’s house with the sole purpose of doing him good, and so to conduct himself as to avoid the very appearance of evil.  Let the physician of to-day begin by coming up to this standard, and add to it all the more recently discovered virtues and graces.

A certain amount of natural ability is requisite to make you a good physician, but by no means that disproportionate development of some special faculty which goes by the name of genius.  A just balance of the mental powers is a great deal more likely to be useful than any single talent, even were it the power of observation; in excess.  For a mere observer is liable to be too fond of facts for their own sake, so that, if he told the real truth, he would confess that he takes more pleasure in a post-mortem examination which shows him what was the matter with a patient, than in a case which insists on getting well and leaving him in the dark as to its nature.  Far more likely to interfere with the sound practical balance of the mind is that speculative, theoretical tendency which has made so many men noted in their day, whose fame has passed away with their dissolving theories.  Read Dr. Bartlett’s comparison of the famous Benjamin Rush with his modest fellow-townsman Dr. William Currie, and see the dangers into which a passion for grandiose generalizations betrayed a man of many admirable qualities.