DEVELOPMENT OF THE MICROBE-KILLER. 5^ 



other person ; but if the person dies, then if the man who 

 treated him be not a physician, protected by a piece of 

 parchment, the case is one of manslaughter, and he is 

 liable to suffer all the pains and penalties of that offence. 

 When a person is sick he may put himself in the care of 

 anybody he pleases; but if he happen to die, his attend- 

 ant may possibly incur a punishment of lifelong im- 

 prisonment. That is the law here, and it prevails in 

 Europe also. I therefore ran some risk ; for although I 

 knew that my medicine was not injurious, yet the peo- 

 ple who came to me for treatment were often in the ad- 

 vanced stages of disease, and if any of them had died 

 while taking my medicine there were plenty of doctors 

 in the neighborhood ready to take advantage and to 

 have me indicted for manslaughter. And it was not the 

 doctors only, for success always creates jealousies, and 

 there were people who, for reasons of their own, did not 

 want me to succeed, and they too would have taken ad- 

 vantage of any opportunity to ruin me. 



My life at this period became very exciting, very dif- 

 ferent from the peaceful times I had had among my 

 flowers. People from all directions wrote to me for in- 

 formation, and sometimes they sent me a description of 

 their ailments. These letters were marvels of composi- 

 tion. A person afflicted with some chronic complaint 

 perhaps must have sat down for half a day's work to 

 describe all his troubles. Possibly he would fill half a 

 dozen sheets of paper, and close his letter without halv- 

 ing told anything that an ordinary physician would have 

 felt it necessary to know. But I knew that his symp- 

 toms were of secondary importance. They were inte- 

 resting to have, but not essential, because all disease is 

 due to the same cause and requires but one cure. 



I could not always make my correspondents under- 

 stand this. They had been accustomed to have the most 

 minute inquiries made by their doctors, and they could 

 not comprehend how I could go to work and cure people 

 without getting the minutest information and asking 

 them an infinite lot of questions. They seemed to think 



