y seem, it was only a short time ago
that a case was reported from New York where the skin of a freshly
killed black cat was applied as a remedy for an ailment that had
refused to yield to the prescribed drugging! And only a few years ago
some one applied to the Liverpool museum for permission to touch a
sick child's head with one of the prehistoric stone axes there
exhibited."

"That was mere superstition," retorted the doctor.

"True," said Carmen. "But _materia medica_ is superstition incarnate.
And because of the superstition that life and virtue and power are
resident in matter, mankind have swallowed nearly everything known to
material sense, in the hope that it would cure them of their own
auto-infection. You remember what awful recipes Luther gave for
disease, and his exclamation of gratitude: 'How great is the mercy of
God who has put such healing virtue in all manner of muck!'"

"Miss Carmen," resumed the doctor, "we physicians are workers, not
theorists. We handle conditions as we find them, not as they ought to
be."

"Oh, no, you don't!" laughed the girl. "You handle conditions as the
human, mortal mind believes them to be, that's all. You accept its
ugly pictures as real, and then you try desperately through
legislation to make us all accept them. Yet you would bitterly resent
it if some religious body should try to legislate its beliefs upon
you.

"Now listen, you doctors are rank materialists. Perhaps it is because,
as Hawthorne puts it, in your researches into the human frame your
higher and more subtle faculties are materialized, and you lose the
spiritual view of existence. Your only remedy for diseased matter is
more matter. And these material remedies? Why, ignorance and
superstition have given rise to by far the larger number of remedies
in use by you to-day! And all of your attempts to rationalize medicine
and place it upon a systematic basis have signally failed, because the
only curative property a drug has is the credulity of the person who
swallows it. And that is a factor which varies with the individual."

"The most advanced physicians give little medicine nowadays, Miss
Carmen."

"They are beginning to get away from it, little by little," she
replied. "In recent years it has begun to dawn upon doctors and
patients alike that the sick who recover do so, not because of the
drugs which they have taken, but _in spite of them_! One of the most
prominent of our contemporary physicians wh