From this fact spring a great proportion of the errors of medical practice.  On it are based the delusions of the various shadowy systems which impose themselves on the ignorant and half-learned public as branches or “schools” of science.  A remedy taken at the time of the ascent in the curve of health is found successful.  The same remedy taken while the curve is in its downward movement proves a failure.

So long as this biological law exists, so long the charlatan will keep his hold on the ignorant public.  So long as it exists, the wisest practitioner will be liable to deceive himself about the effect of what he calls and loves to think are his remedies.  Long-continued and sagacious observation will to some extent undeceive him; but were it not for the happy illusion that his useless or even deleterious drugs were doing good service, many a practitioner would give up his calling for one in which he could be more certain that he was really being useful to the subjects of his professional dealings.  For myself, I should prefer a physician of a sanguine temperament, who had a firm belief in himself and his methods.  I do not wonder at all that the public support a whole community of pretenders who show the portraits of the patients they have “cured.”  The best physicians will tell you that, though many patients get well under their treatment, they rarely cure anybody.  If you are told also that the best physician has many more patients die on his hands than the worst of his fellow-practitioners, you may add these two statements to your bundle of paradoxes, and if they puzzle you I will explain them at some future time.

[I take this opportunity of correcting a statement now going the rounds of the medical and probably other periodicals.  In “The Journal of the American Medical Association,” dated April 26,1890, published at Chicago, I am reported, in quotation marks, as saying, “Give me opium, wine, and milk, and I will cure all diseases to which flesh is heir.”

In the first place, I never said I will cure, or can cure, or would or could cure, or had cured any disease.  My venerated instructor, Dr. James Jackson, taught me never to use that expression.  Curo means, I take care of, he used to say, and in that sense, if you mean nothing more, it is properly employed.  So, in the amphitheatre of the Ecole de Medecine, I used to read the words of Ambroise Pare, “Je le pansay, Dieu le guarist.”  (I dressed his wound, and God cured him.) Next, I am not in the habit of talking about “the diseases to which flesh is heir.”  The expression has become rather too familiar for repetition, and belongs to the rhetoric of other latitudes.  And, lastly, I have said some plain things, perhaps some sharp ones, about the abuse of drugs and the limited number of vitally important remedies, but I am not so ignorantly presumptuous as to make the foolish statement falsely attributed to me.]

I paused a minute or two, and as no one spoke out; I put a question to the Counsellor.