Without any pretense of faith in any doctor who is not regular, and without prejudice to a sincere intention of calling in a thoroughly instructed and expert practitioner whenever occasion demands, it is still permissible to smile amiably at the professional jealousy of quacks. The successful physician, with exceptions which happily are much more numerous than they were, is the most intolerant despot on earth. And we encourage him to be so.
We are vaguely aware of the limitations of his knowledge; we know that he has to guess first what is the matter with us, and next what will do us good, and that though there are facts his acquaintance with which helps him to guess right, many theories that regulate his professional action are still hypothetical, and may or may not be correct. We know that he has discovered that many of the methods his father used were unwise and deleterious, and that the doses his grandfather gave often hastened the result they were intended to prevent and hindered what they were designed to induce.
But it is one thing for us to flock of our own accord to the doctors, and quite another thing for those professional gentlemen to hold that we shall come to them and to none else, and that we may neither be legitimately born, nor die legally, except' with the concurrence of the learned faculty. —
