ery portion of--in
Trilby's immortal phrase--"the altogether." Disease can speak most
eloquently through the hand, the carriage, the gait, and, in a way that
the patient may be entirely unconscious of, the voice. These forms of
expression are naturally not so frequent as those of the face, on
account of the extraordinary importance of the great systems whose
clock-dials and indices form what we term the human countenance. But
when they do occur they are fully as graphic and more definitely and
distinctively localizing.

Next in importance to the face comes the hand, and volumes have been
written upon this alone. Containing, as it does, that throbbing little
blood-tube, the radial artery, which has furnished us for centuries with
one of our oldest and most reliable guides to health conditions, the
pulse, it has played a most important part in surface diagnoses. To this
day, in fact, Arabic and Turkish physicians in visiting their patients
on the feminine side of the family are allowed to see nothing of them
except the hand, which is thrust through an opening in a curtain. How
accurate their diagnoses are, based upon this slender clew, I should not
like to aver, but a sharp observer might learn much even from this
limited area.

We have--though, of course, in lesser degree--all the color and line
pictures with which we have been dealing upon the face. Though not an
index of any special system, it has the great advantage of being our one
approach to an indication of the general muscular tone of the body, as
indicated both in its grasp and in the poses it assumes at rest. The
patient with a limp and nerveless hand-clasp, whose hand is inclined to
lie palm upward and open instead of palm downward and half-closed, is
apt to be either seriously ill, or not in a position to make much of a
fight against the attack of disease.

The nails furnish one of our best indices of the color of the blood and
condition of the circulation. Our best surface test of the vigor of the
circulation is to press upon a nail, or the back of the finger just
above it, until the blood is driven out of it, and when our thumb is
removed from the whitened area to note the rapidity with which the red
freshet of blood will rush back to reoccupy it.

In the natural growth of the nail, traveling steadily outward from root
to free edge, its tissues, at first opaque and whitish, and thus
forming the little white crescent, or _lunula_, found at the base of
m