Athothis : a satire on modern medicine / by Thomas C. Minor.

fessor, stethoscope in hand, informs his hearers that he detects a cardiac murmur and the patient has valvular disease? Then, too, the wise lecturer listens to rails of many kinds, grand, gloomy, and peculiar noises, and tells the class this or that lung is diseased, but the student neither sees the malady nor hears the sounds. No hos- pital pathologist ever yet lived who could not relate curious tales in regard to celebrated clinician's,stories of mistaken diagnoses and most ludicrous errors. For your hospital lecturer puts his own valuation on the significa- tion of a few symptoms, and is as apt to be wrong as right. As a man can not use his own reason, but must see things through the professor's spectacles, it follows that little good accrues either to patient or student from such instruction, and methinks that this system of medi- cal education is justly open to criticism." " Nonsense ! " exclaimed Paulus Androcydes, in a tone of contempt and pity. " There is no better field for the exercise of reason and observation than a clinical hospital; for, even granting that men err in judgment in many cases, there are numerous instances in which their con- clusions are right. The mortuary often proves that our diagnoses have been correct." " There it is again ! " said Athothis. " The mortuary ! Of what benefit is a dead-house to your patients ? You profess to cure. You establish hospitals for the good of the pauper sick, and not for the benefit of their medical attendants. You oblige the poor patients entering these institutions to go before classes of students, and exhibit at the sweet will of hospital managers, whose sole object is to run a so-called charity in the interest of some col- lege. The victim of disease, dispirited and downcast, homeless and friendless, seeks a refuge where she may