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

questions, are usually the ones to recover. It is your sceptical and morbidly curious who suffer and become the prey of veritable maladies. Remember, when you start out in practice, that you are the doctor, and no matter what your client's social or political position, do not, un- der any circumstances, humor his whims; for if you do, he will at once imagine that he knows as much about his ailment and its treatment as his medical attendant, and you will have in him a stubborn and ignorant consult- ant." " Listen ! " cried Athothis, approvingly. " Here is a good teacher of the healing art. One year in a buggy with such a wise old preceptor is worth three years in a modern medical college." " How absurd," retorted Paulus Androcydes, " for such a preceptor is a poor instructor when he claims that imagination can produce heart disease, consumption, and the rest of the maladies that prey on mortals. But, hark ! Doctor Rusticus is braying again." " "When you go to the medical college of Utopia," con- tinued Doctor Rusticus, " do not be led away by the erratic brilliancy of young lecturers who, at the present day, become professors after practicing for two years, whose learning and experience in the healing art is not as great as the unsophisticated public mind imagines. These young savants who quote lists of foreign authors a yard long in order to sustain the wildest assertions; these medical parrots who, poised on college perches, dis- cuss with intense volubility of the progress made by medical science. Do not permit such downy chinned sages to sap the present sound judgment you possess, nor be not molded to their views, since the theories they enunciate are ever as transitory and changing as those of