T6 MICROBES AND THE MICROBE-KILLER. 



overrun with weeds of various descriptions, and were to 

 tell his assistant first to classify those weeds, then to 

 pull up one kind, afterward to cut off another, and so 

 on. By the time the work was accomplished the flowers 

 would be smothered to death, and new weeds would be 

 coming up where the first had been removed. 



So it is with disease in the human body. We are not 

 to waste time and endanger the patient's health by 

 trifling about special symptoms. We know the person 

 is sick. We know the cause of his sickness ; let us, 

 then, remove that cause, and the person will be well. 

 If we choose to talk among ourselves about his symp- 

 toms, that will not harm anybody, but we have no right 

 to endanger a patient's life or to delay his cure. Did 

 you ever go into a hospital when a leading physician is 

 going around the wards ? A new patient may have 

 come in whose case particularly interests him. He will 

 stop at the bedside of that patient, and, although the 

 poor fellow may be too sick to rise or turn, he will spend 

 half an hour pounding and thumping him, listening to 

 his heart and his lungs, and going through a tedious 

 ceremony, simply to try and diagnose some minute 

 points which have nothing whatever to do with the cure 

 or with the mode of treatment that the, disease calls for. 

 It looks scientific. It tends to surround the doctor's 

 calling with a halo of mystery. It deceives the patient 

 and the public. It keeps them in ignorance. It hides 

 from them the true simplicity of medicine and disease, 

 and leads them to suppose that there can be no chance 

 for them in this world or the next if they attempt to 

 cure themselves without a physician's aid. Diagnosing 

 disease is simply blindfolding the public, but physicians 

 dare not acknowledge it, for if they did their glorious 

 work would be undone, their services would not be 

 needed, and they would have to fall back upon other 

 occupations. 



I have ever been a close observer of human nature and 

 of the world, and I have seen a great deal of it ; but 

 never till my discovery came before the pubhc was 1 



