the face, and, for the matter
of that, the head the head, was the intake opening of the food-canal,
the mouth. Around this necessarily grouped themselves the outlook
departments, the special senses, the nose, the eyes, and ears; while
later, by an exceedingly clumsy device of nature, part of the mouth was
split off for the intake of a new ventilating system. So that when we
glance at the face we are looking first at the automatically controlled
intake openings of the two most important systems in the body, the
alimentary and the respiratory, whose muscles contract and relax, ripple
in comfort or knot in agony, in response to every important change that
takes place throughout the entire extent of both.

Second, at the apertures of the two most important members of the
outlook corps, the senses of sight and of smell. These are not only
sharply alert to every external indication of danger, but by a curious
reversal, which we will consider more carefully later, reflect signals
of distress or discomfort from within. Last, but not least, the
translucent tissues, the semi-transparent skin, barely veiling the
pulsating mesh of myriad blood-vessels, is a superb color index,
painting in vivid tints--"yellow, and ashy pale, and hectic red"--the
living, ever changing, moving picture of the vigor of the life-centre,
the blood-pump, and the richness of its crimson stream. Small wonder
that the shrewd advice of a veteran physician to the medical student
should be: "The first step in the examination is to look at your
patient; the second is to look again, and the third to take another look
at him; and keep on looking all through the examination."

It is no uncommon thing for an expert diagnostician deliberately to lead
the patient into conversation upon some utterly irrelevant subjects,
like the weather, the crops, or the incidents of his journey to the
city, simply for the purpose of taking his mind off himself, putting
him at his ease, and meanwhile quietly deciphering the unmistakable
cuneiform inscription, often twice palimpsest, written by the finger of
disease upon his face. It takes time and infinite pains. In no other
realm does genius come nearer to Buffon's famous description, "the
capacity for taking pains," but it is well worth the while. And with all
our boasted and really marvelous progress in precise knowledge of
disease, accomplished through the microscope in the laboratory, it
remains a fact of experience that so care