44 MEMORIES OF MY LIFE 



able success in turning out his patients nominally 

 cured. There is. still much lack of exact knowledge 

 of what Nature can do without assistance from 

 medicine, if aided only by cheering influences, rest, 

 suggestion, and good nursing. 



I wish that hospitals could be turned into places 

 for experiment more than they are, in the following 

 perfectly humane direction. Suppose two different 

 and competing treatments of a particular malady ; I 

 have just mentioned a case in point. Let the patients 

 suffering under it be given the option of being placed 

 under Dr. A. or Dr. B., the respective representatives 

 of the two methods, and the results be statistically 

 compared. A co-operation without partisanship 

 between many large hospitals ought to speedily 

 settle doubts that now hang unnecessarily long under 

 dispute. 



Medical statistics are, however, the least suitable 

 of any I know for refined comparisons, because the 

 conditions that cannot be, or at all events are not 

 taken into account, are local, very influential, and 

 apt to differ greatly. It is, however, humiliating 

 to find how much has failed to attract attention for 

 want of even the rudest statistics. I doubt whether 

 the unaided apprehension of man suffices to dis- 

 tinguish between the frequency of what occurs on 

 an average four times in ten events and one that 

 occurs five times. Much grosser proportions have 

 been wholly overlooked by doctors. I referred 

 once to many dictionaries and works of medicine 

 published before the time of Broca, some ninety years 

 ago, and did not find a single reference to the almost 

 invariable loss of speech associated with paralysis of 



