ncies. Look at the annual reports of the deaths in any of our great
cities, and see how their regularity approaches the uniformity of the
tides, and their variations keep pace with those of the seasons. The
inundations of the Nile are not more certainly to be predicted than the
vast wave of infantile disease which flows in upon all our great cities
with the growing heats of July,--than the fevers and dysenteries which
visit our rural districts in the months of the falling leaf.

"The physician watches these changes as the astronomer watched the
rise of the great river. He longs to rescue individuals, to protect
communities from the inroads of these destroying agencies. He uses all
the means which experience has approved, tries every rational method
which ingenuity can suggest. Some fortunate recovery leads him to
believe he has hit upon a preventive or a cure for a malady which had
resisted all known remedies. His rescued patient sounds his praises, and
a wide circle of his patient's friends joins in a chorus of eulogies.
Self-love applauds him for his sagacity. Self-interest congratulates him
on his having found the road to fortune; the sense of having proved a
benefactor of his race smooths the pillow on which he lays his head
to dream of the brilliant future opening before him. If a single
coincidence may lead a person of sanguine disposition to believe that he
has mastered a disease which had baffled all who were before his time,
and on which his contemporaries looked in hopeless impotence, what must
be the effect of a series of such coincidences even on a mind of calmer
temper! Such series of coincidences will happen, and they may well
deceive the very elect. Think of Dr. Rush,--you know what a famous man
he was, the very head and front of American medical science in his day,
--and remember how he spoke about yellow fever, which he thought he had
mastered!

"Thus the physician is entangled in the meshes of a wide conspiracy,
in which he and his patient and their friends, and-Nature herself, are
involved. What wonder that the history of Medicine should be to so great
an extent a record of self-delusion!

"If this seems a dangerous concession to the enemies of the true science
and art of healing, I will remind you that it is all implied in the
first aphorism of Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine. Do not draw a
wrong inference from the frank statement of the difficulties which
beset the medical practitioner. Think