ntenance when in the rooms of the sick.

As the years went on, my faith in remedies did not increase; but I had
to dose to meet the superstitious needs of the people. My practice,
though far short of what it seemed to merit from the pains bestowed upon
it, was large enough for all the needs of profitable study had I been in
a condition for thought and reflection. It was not to my encouragement
that there were those doing a far larger business with doses simply
crucifying, and because crucifying, a far larger attendance was the
direct result.

I now see, as I did not then so clearly, that Nature's victories are
often won against the desperate odds of treatments that are simply
barbarous; and yet Nature is so powerful, so persistent in the attempts
to right all her wrongs, that she wins the victory in the great
majority of cases no matter how severely she may be taxed with means
that hinder. The great majority of the severely sick of a hundred years
ago recovered in spite of the bloody lancet and treatments that are the
barbarism of to-day.

II.

I was called one day to one of the families of the poorest of the poor,
where I found a sick case that for once in my life set me to thinking.
The patient was a sallow, overgrown girl in early maturity, with a
history of several months of digestive and other troubles. I found a
very sick patient, so sick that for a period of three weeks not even one
drink of water was retained, not one dose of medicine, and it was not
until several more days that water could be borne. When finally water
could be retained my patient seemed brighter in mind, the complexion was
clearer, and she seemed actually stronger. As for the tongue, which at
first was heavily coated, the improvement was striking; while the
breath, utterly foul at first, was strikingly less offensive. In every
way the patient was very much better.

I was so surprised at this that I determined at once to let the good
work go on on Nature's own terms, and so it did until about the
thirty-fifth day, when there was a call, not for the undertaker, but for
food, a call that marked the close of the disease. The pulse and
temperature had become normal, and there was a tongue as clean as the
tongue of a nursing infant.

Up to this time this was the most severely sick case I ever had that
recovered, and yet with not apparently more wasting of the body than
with other cases of as protracted sickness in which more or less fo