nt. You ask me whether his cures are really
remarkable, and, if so, what his system is. I answer unhesitatingly,
that his cures are very remarkable, indeed, and that I look upon him as
a sort of Napoleon of medicine. His view is that the pharmacopaeal doses
are in nearly every instance much too low. Excessive timidity has cut
down the dose until it has ceased to produce a real effect upon the
disease.

Medical men, according to his view, have been afraid of producing a
poisonous effect with their drugs. With him, on the contrary, the
whole art of medicine lies in judicious poisoning, and when the case
is serious, his remedies are heroic. Where, in epilepsy, I should have
given thirty-grain doses of bromide or chloral every four hours, he
would give two drachms every three. No doubt it will seem to you very
kill-or-cure, and I am myself afraid that a succession of coroners'
inquests may check Cullingworth's career; but hitherto he has had no
public scandal, while the cases which he has brought back to life have
been numerous. He is the most fearless fellow. I have seen him pour
opium into a dysenteric patient until my hair bristled. But either his
knowledge or his luck always brings him out right.

Then there are other cures which depend, I think, upon his own personal
magnetism. He is so robust and loud-voiced and hearty that a weak
nervous patient goes away from him recharged with vitality. He is so
perfectly confident that he can cure them, that he makes them perfectly
confident that they can be cured; and you know how in nervous cases the
mind reacts upon the body. If he chose to preserve crutches and sticks,
as they do in the mediaeval churches, he might, I am sure, paper
his consulting room with them. A favourite device of his with an
impressionable patient is to name the exact hour of their cure. "My
dear," he will say, swaying some girl about by the shoulders, with his
nose about three inches from hers, "you'll feel better to-morrow at a
quarter to ten, and at twenty past you'll be as well as ever you were in
your life. Now, keep your eye on the clock, and see if I am not right."
Next day, as likely as not, her mother will be in, weeping tears of
joy; and another miracle has been added to Cullingworth's record. It may
smell of quackery, but it is exceedingly useful to the patient.

Still I must confess that there is nothing about Cullingworth which jars
me so much as the low view which he takes of our professio