Medicine has been defined to be the art or science of amusing a sick man with frivolous speculations about his disorder, and of tampering ingeniously, till nature either kills or cures him. -Jeffrey.

Doctor, no medicine. We are machines made to live, organized expressly for that purpose. Such is our nature. Do not counteract the living principle. Leave it at liberty to defend itself, and it will do better than your drugs. — Napoleon.

There are those of my profession who have a credulity about the action of drugs, a belief in their supreme control and exactness of effect, which amounts to superstition, and fills many of us with amazement. This form of idolatry is at times the dull-witted child of laziness, or it is a queer form of self-esteem, which sets the idol of self-made opinion on too firm a base to be easily shaken by the rudeness of facts. But if you watched these men you would find them changing their idols. Such too profound belief in mere drugs is apt, especially in the lazy thinker, to give rise to neglect of more natural aids, and these tendencies are strengthened and helped by the dislike of most patients to follow a schedule of life, and by the comfort they seem to find in substituting three pills a day for a troublesome obedience to strict rules of diet, of exercise, and of work. Dr. Mitchell.

The doctor who gives much medicine and many medicines, who is continually changing them, and who does not insist with care on knowing all about your habits as to diet, meal-times, sleep, modes of work, and hours of recreation, is, on the whole, one to avoid. The family doctor is most of all apt to fail as to these details, espe

cially if he be an overworked victim of routine, and have not that habitual vigilance of duty which should be an essential part of his value. Dr. Mitchell.

If there be a regal solitude it is a sick-bed. How the patient lords it there! What caprices he acts without control! How king-like he sways his pillow-tumbling and tossing, and shifting, and lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it to the ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples ! — Lamb.

Sickness is early old age; it teaches us diffidence in our earthly state, and inspires us with thoughts of a future. Pope.

Every new case in a household should be dealt with as if it were a stranger's, and outside familiarity should not be allowed to breed contempt of caution in study or lead to half measures.- Dr. Mitchell.

The social nearness of the doctor to his patient is a common cause of inert advice, and nowhere more distinctly so than when unwise physicians attempt to practise in their own households on those they love. — Dr. Mitchell.

There are very few instances of chronic ailments, however slight, which should not be met by advice as to modes of living, in the full breadth of this term; and only by a competent union of such, with reasonable use of drugs, can all be done most speedily that should be done. I am far from wishing to make any one believe that medicines are valueless. Nor do I think that the most extreme dosing employed nowadays by any one is as really hurtful as the neglect to urge efficiently the value

of definite hygienic means. There are, indeed, diseases which can only be helped by heroic measures; but in this case were I the patient I should like to be pretty certain as to the qualifications of my hero. - Dr. Mitchell.

Sometimes it is undesirable to give explanations until they can be securely correct, or haply the sick man is too ill to receive them. Then we are apt, and wisely, to treat some dominant symptom, and to wait until the disease assumes definite shape. So it is that much of what we give is mild enough. - Dr. Mitchell.

Within a few years the instruments of precision have so multiplied that a well-trained consultant may be called on to know and handle as many tools as a mechanic. Their use, the exactness they teach and demand, the increasing refinement in drugs and our ability to give them in condensed forms, all tend towards making the physician more accurate, and by overtaxing him, owing to the time all such methodical studies require, have made his work such that only the patient and the dutiful can do it justice. Dr. Mitchell.

MUSIC

CHAPTER XVII.

VOCAL AND INSTRUMENTAL.

"The soul of music slumbers in the shell

Till waked and kindled by the master's spell;
And feeling hearts, touch them but rightly, pour
A thousand melodies unheard before!"

Samuel Rogers.

You have heard, no doubt, of the saying by General Sherman that he could not as a rule distinguish one tune from another; but that as he attended about three hundred public meetings every year, and heard "Marching through Georgia" played at least three times at each meeting, he had learned almost to know that tune. Many people are constituted in that way, and some of them even find great enjoyment in music, although they can scarcely tell one tune from another. Perhaps there is some advantage in it, because poor music pleases them as well as good music, and they have none of the painful sensations that false notes give to the real musician.

If you are one of these people the best thing that you can do with music is to listen to it, and never try to produce it yourself. Such a man or woman (for this peculiarity belongs equally to both sexes) may with years of practice, if it is begun early in life, become a good mechanical performer on the piano, and perhaps some other instruments; but he or she never can go beyond the mechanical stage, for the great performer plays as much with the heart as with the fingers, and summons at will a silvery cloud to envelop everything on earth