into the paper, and vegetarianism
received a temporary boost which in my opinion it still badly needs
for the benefit of the popular welfare.

Among the prophets of that day certainly should be numbered another of
our teachers, Dr. Sutton, an author, and very much of a personality.
For while being one of the consulting physicians of the largest of
London hospitals, he was naturally scientific and strictly
professional. He was very far, however, from being the conventionalist
of those days, and the younger students used to look greatly askance
at him. His message always was: "Drugs are very little use whatever.
Nature is the source of healing. Give her a chance." Thus, a careful
history would be read over to him; all the certain signs of typhoid
would be noted--and his comment almost always was: "This case won't
benefit by drugs. We will have the bed wheeled out into the sunshine."
The next case would be acute lobar pneumonia and the same treatment
would be adopted. "This patient needs air, gentlemen. We must wheel
him out into the sunshine"--and so on. How near we are coming to his
teaching in these days is already impressing itself upon our minds.
Unfortunately the fact that the doctors realize that medicines are not
so potent as our forbears thought has not left the public with the
increased confidence in the profession which the infinitely more
rational treatment of to-day justifies, and valuable time is wasted
and fatal delays incurred, by a return of the more impressionable
public to quacks with high-sounding titles, or to cults where faith is
almost credulity.

Truly one has lived through wonderful days in the history of the
healing art. The first operations which I saw performed at our
hospitals were before Lord Lister's teaching was practised; though
even in my boyhood I remember getting leave to run up from Marlborough
to London to see my brother, on whom Sir Joseph Lister had operated
for osteomyelitis of the leg. Our most famous surgeon in 1880 was Sir
Walter Rivington; and to-day there rises in memory the picture of him
removing a leg at the thigh, clad in a blood-stained, black velvet
coat, and without any attempt at or idea of asepsis. The main thing
was speed, although the patient was under ether, and in quickly
turning round the tip of the sword-like amputation knife, he made a
gash in the patient's other leg. The whole thing seemed horrible
enough to us students, but the surgeon smiled, saying, "Fortu