Medical Fads and Fancies 21 
ties, but if medicine now is in possession of certain 
seeming fundamentals, every medical advance, every re- 
search, opens up many unappreciated and unforeseen 
problems—sidechains, ramifying in a score of confusing 
and interlocking directions. We know so little when 
we had thought to know so much; we are no longer so 
sure. 
Most of us have lived within the most momentous 
decade that medicine may ever know. Not the period of 
Pasteur’s activities or the application of the principles 
that he propounded; not the period of the development 
of surgery or the pathological teachings of Virchow and 
Koch, but in the time that saw a lessening of the dom- 
inating identity of the general practitioner and the in- 
vasion of his field by the various specialists, with re- 
sulting vastly more accurate knowledge. We remember 
the family doctor of our childhood—revered of memory. 
He of the flowing beard, frock coat, bag of accoutre- 
ments, and with all the gentle yet persistent aroma of 
iodine. Without jest, he was the friend of the individual, 
the confidant and advisor of the family. The like of 
his beautiful relationship to us will not soon be seen 
again. His was the dignity that encompassed the gamut 
of human emotions. On the other hand, while his moral 
function was great, and he did a vast good in the alle- 
viation of suffering and the treatment of simple diseases 
largely by empiric measures, it is but fair to say that 
his information was not great—not so much through 
deficience of his own, but as the result of the lack of 
real knowledge of the medicine of a generation ago. The 
system of his polypharmacy, his wholesale prescription 
of nasty medicines, did not differ from other species of 
charlatanisms save through his belief and sincerity. 
While we do full honor to his altruism and the noble- 
