EDITORIAL OBSERVATIONS. 407 
&c.” In reply to the latter part of this quotation, it should be 
understood, that, whether a man “ stays” one day or one year 
at the Royal Veterinary College, he cannot be admitted as 
a pupil under the amount of the regular fee, which is twenty 
guineas : a sum, we should imagine, few farmers in these free- 
trade days would be disposed to spend upon their sons, to 
“ stay but a fortnight at College.” 
The former part of this quotation, however, calls for more 
consideration. We have always regarded with a feeling allied 
to disgust popular medical writing . It has done the patient 
harm and the doctor too ; while any benefit that has accrued 
from it can be estimated only at the treasury of the publisher, 
for whose house such plausible and saleable stuff has been con- 
cocted. Publishers’ long purses have seduced some of the best 
men, in our and other professions, to write that which they must 
have felt no brother-professional could applaud no more than 
their own consciences approve. 
If pathology, with its handmaid, therapeutics, derive its 
value from physiology, and physiology be nothing worth with- 
out anatomy, then must popular medicine, into the composition 
of which none of these sciences enter, be a fallacy — a hit or 
miss sort of knowledge, which is likely to be twice wrong for 
once right : in a word, a most uncertain and perilous pursuit. 
It is of no use to interlard the descriptions of disease with a 
smattering of anatomy and physiology : giving such things to 
“ useful knowledge” readers in general is like casting pearls 
to swine. Besides, supposing medical science were reduced to 
such mathematical principles that every disease had its appro- 
priate remedy assigned it, does not every medical man well 
know that no two cases of diseases, or two patients labouring 
under the same malady, ever presented mathematical similitude! 
Does not the disease itself vary in character and intensity and 
tendency ! and does not the constitution of one patient differ 
altogether from that of another 1 And yet our employers are 
to be taught by popular medicine to “cure” diseases themselves, 
and to shut the door against the doctor, as of no service until 
the “closing scene” be let down. If there be one reason we 
dare vaunt for self-gratulation more than another, it is that we 
