Doctrines and maxims, good or bad, flow abroad from a public teacher as from a fountain, and his faulty lessons may become the indirect source of incalculable mischief and suffering to hundreds who have never even heard his name.—Sir Thomas Watson.

Physicians vary their prescriptions to give the disorder an opportunity of choosing for itself.—Lacon.

As Mr. Crowe was surgeon to the hospital, every new experiment and each fresh result was religiously tried upon a human subject. Being a man grateful for any little services his assistant rendered him, he repaid him in various ways, one of the most valued rewards being the privilege of trying “any new drug you may take a fancy to upon any of my patients, Mr. Mole.” None of Mr. Mole’s services went unrecognised, and the acknowledgment was not costly to the professor. The sufferers in the wards where his beds were located would not have seen the matter in precisely the same light had it been explained to them, but Mr. Crowe was really generous—with other people’s pain!

“I wish to investigate,” said one of his dressers, “the presence of lithic acid in the blood of rheumatic patients. May I blister one or two of your patients, Mr. Crowe?”

“Oh, certainly,” said the obliging physiologist; “only you must take precautions to let the patient imagine you are doing it for his benefit, and be careful the nurses don’t see what you are about—nurses are getting so ’cute now-a-days. With these provisos, you are free to roam at large, my friend, over the bodies of any of my clinics.”

Several poor men and women broke out in great blisters the following morning, the serum from which was carefully collected and evaporated in the laboratory for pretty crystals of lithic acid. “They look very nice if carefully mounted; but mind you place a black circle round the covering glass, it shows ’em up better. Grumbled a bit, did she? She must have the battery again if she is intractable.”

Jack Murphy, a merry, reckless little dog as we know, used to tell a droll story of his first bit of skin-grafting in the wards.

“Graft him,” said Mr. Mole. “Don’t know how? Oh, you just snip bits of skin off his arm and pop ’em on the raw surface of the burnt leg, and in a few days you’ll find ’em growing like watercress all over the shop. Perfectly simple. One of the grandest discoveries of modern surgery.”

Now these directions, although satisfactory to the adept, were wanting in lucidity to the pupil; and Mr. Murphy, who never liked to admit even to himself that there was anything in his profession too hard for him, went down into the erysipelas ward and set to work upon his wretched victim with a light heart.

“Going to heal up your leg, old chap, in a brace of shakes. Splendid invention for putting a new skin on your leg. Sha’n’t hurt you a bit. Don’t squeal. I’m just going to snip off a tiny bit or two from your arm, and transplant ’em on to your leg.” And having cheered up the patient with a stiff glass of grog which the nurse had at command, the vigorous young dresser took off a dozen or more pieces of skin the size of a threepenny-piece, from the arms, and scattered them in likely places on the badly healing burn.

When Mr. Murphy entered the dining-room that night, he was received with a perfect roar of laughter from the house surgeons, who had become aware of the ignorant barbarity the burnt man had suffered; and Mr. Murphy was made to know that his idea of a snip of skin for grafting was at least a hundred times in excess of what it ought to be, and that for the future he must be less generous with his pound of flesh. Even the patient found out the error, and Murphy, who was a good-hearted fellow, wished he had known more about skin-grafting before he had punished him so. It was some weeks ere the victims arms healed, and the scars remain now, and even the operator is still sore when the subject is referred to.

It was wonderful how they managed to get the patients to take all the new remedies that were tested upon them. Folks are usually very careful as to the physic they swallow. Your poor folk do not mind it being nasty, they rather like it thick, with a good rich, nourishing sediment and an awakening odour; but they are very suspicious of anything that gives them queer sensations. They often return to their doctor with a bottle of stuff which he has prescribed them, and declare that they “cannot take any more of it, because the first dose made them feel as if all their senses was a-running away from them down their right arm, making them feel that strange in their toes as they seemed as if they wore going to die.” And this when the poor practitioner has merely given them perhaps a little quinine, or some simple diffusible stimulant! Their confidence seems to come with the increase in the number of their medical attendants; and when the chief surgeon, with his dozen of satellites, supported by several capable-looking nurses, has ordered them to take a decoction that works in their systems as if scorpions and tarantella spiders were careering through their veins, they submit with meekest resignation, and admire the regularity with which their doses are timed. You can do things in hospital it would be as much as your life were worth to attempt outside. A hospital doctor may steal the horse where a general practitioner dare not look over the hedge. “It’s the confidence as does it,” Mrs. Podger used to say. But not always. Some do resent. The spread of Socialism, the tracts of the various societies which dare to question some of the cherished privileges of the profession, and the general uprising against all authority that characterizes the present age, have produced a class of patients who provokingly assert their right “to know what you are about with them.” Such are awkward people of whom to make use.

These persons are not liked in the wards, and are frequently cured right away and sent about their business with indecent haste. A sort of ungrateful folk that want to get all they can out of the hospitals, and then be off. A most unappreciative class, which seems a growing one too. “Like to know what they thinks ’ospitals is for?” said Podger. “Seems to me they think ’em ’otels!”

Latimer complained in his day, that “physick was a remedy prepared only for rich folks, and not for poor, for the poor man is not able to wage the physician.” He could not fairly say that now. It is possible, if good Master Latimer were preaching one of his plain sermons at Paul’s Cross, he would complain for quite an opposite reason.