“I can’t say how it is with other people’s patients; most of my families are doing very well without my help, at this time.”

“Do tell me, Doctor, how many families you own.  I have heard it said that some of our fellow-citizens have two distinct families, but you speak as if you had a dozen.”

“I have, but not so large a number as I should like.  I could take care of fifteen or twenty more without:  having to work too hard.”

“Why, Doctor, you are as bad as a Mormon.  What do you mean by calling certain families yours?”

“Don’t you speak about my client?  Don’t your clients call you their lawyer?  Does n’t your baker, does n’t your butcher, speak of the families he supplies as his families?”

To be sure, yes, of course they do; but I had a notion that a man had as many doctors as he had organs to be doctored.”

“Well, there is some truth in that; but did you think the old-fashioned family doctor was extinct, a fossil like the megatherium?”

“Why, yes, after the recent experience of a friend of mine, I did begin to think that there would soon be no such personage left as that same old-fashioned family doctor.  Shall I tell you what that experience was?”

The young Doctor said he should be mightily pleased to hear it.  He was going to be one of those old-fogy practitioners himself.

“I don’t know,” the Counsellor said, “whether my friend got all the professional terms of his story correctly, nor whether I have got them from him without making any mistakes; but if I do make blunders in some of the queer names, you can correct me.  This is my friend’s story: 

“My family doctor,” he said, “was a very sensible man, educated at a school where they professed to teach all the specialties, but not confining himself to any one branch of medical practice.  Surgical practice he did not profess to meddle with, and there were some classes of patients whom he was willing to leave to the female physician.  But throughout the range of diseases not requiring exceptionally skilled manual interference, his education had authorized him to consider himself, and he did consider himself, qualified to undertake the treatment of all ordinary cases—­It so happened that my young wife was one of those uneasy persons who are never long contented with their habitual comforts and blessings, but always trying to find something a little better, something newer, at any rate.  I was getting to be near fifty years old, and it happened to me, as it not rarely does to people at about that time of life, that my hair began to fall out.  I spoke of it to my doctor, who smiled, said it was a part of the process of reversed evolution, but might be retarded a little, and gave me a prescription.  I did not find any great effect from it, and my wife would have me go to a noted dermatologist.  The distinguished specialist examined my denuded scalp with great care.  He looked at it through a strong