102 
EDITORIAL OBSERVATIONS. 
tioner may be in diagnosing disease, unless he be conversant 
with the means for its eradication, or rather, how to assist 
nature's efforts to do so, he must fail in effecting a cure, or 
alleviating suffering. 
In one thing doubtless there has been an advance, 
namely, a growing disbelief in specifics; i. e. } in the power 
of a given drug to expel a given disease. 
“The idea of specifics had its origin in some metaphysical notion of 
disease as an entity in the organism, which entity was cast out by another 
entity, somewhat stronger coming in; and this notion is dying out of the 
professional mind. We now regard disease as a condition of the organism, 
which has to be changed ; and whilst the number of even so-called specifics 
is daily decreasing, an increased knowledge of the early conditions of disease 
is displaying the fact that by judicious measures, medicinal and others, 
those conditions may be changed or their results obviated. Bad health is 
not regarded as an entity to be removed, but a state to be improved by 
physical education. Disease is not a demon to be exorcised, but a bad 
habit to be reformed.’ 5 
The changes proposed by Dr. Reynolds, so that the 
science of medicine may not only maintain its status, but 
continue to progress, are as follow, and in them we think 
we perceive much that is suggestive to ourselves. 
“ Instead of wasting two or three years in compounding pills and draughts, 
and occasionally seeing practice which he cannot understand, the student, 
before he enters upon his curriculum of college or hospital work, should be 
well grounded in physics, chemistry, and botany, and not be bothered (as 
he often is during this period even), with the ‘bones.’ He should 
bestow comparatively much iess of his time upon anatomy, and much more 
upon physiology. Lecturers on medicine and surgery should not waste 
their time on pathological anatomy; but leave that to its proper teacher, 
and thus gain more time for instruction in symptoms and vital charac¬ 
teristics of disease. The spirit of investigation should be evoked rather 
than details crammed down, and the action of medicines should be made 
a special object of clinical study. 
“By such means we should gain the advantages derivable from the pre¬ 
valent philosophical system of the day, and should at the same time avoid 
its injurious results. Practical medicine would then advance, instead of 
becoming, as it now appears in danger of becoming, a cumbrous mass of 
unwieldy diagnostic and prognostic machinery, with the daily increasing 
conviction that therapeutically considered, it is of little use.” 
It has been well said that the true student of the noble 
art of healing now-a-days is a modest and a watchful man. 
Conscious of the importance and dignity of his calling, he 
does not compromise it by pretensions that are extravagant. 
He waits upon Nature in the only spirit which wins any¬ 
thing from her, and, confessing himself her servant, he 
goes the right way to become her master. A noble field is 
