Accidents happen, but they are the offspring of carelessness. Sometimes,
also, unexpected and temporary extreme results surprise us, as when an
opiate purges, or five grains of an iodide prove to be gravely
poisonous. These occurrences are due to individual peculiarities, which
we can as yet neither explain nor anticipate. One man can take opium
with almost the impunity which belongs naturally to birds. Another is
put to sleep by the dose you give a baby. All this teaches caution, but
it is not a matter for blame when it gives rise to alarming
consequences, and happily these cases of what we call idiosyncrasies are
exceptionally uncommon.

Physicians are often enough tempted to give a simple placebo to patients
who are impatient, and ask instant treatment when we know that time is
what we want, either for study of present symptoms or to enable the
growing disorder to spell itself out for us, as it were, letter by
letter, until its nature becomes clear. The practice is harmless, but
there is, of course, a better way, if we possess the entire confidence
of the patient or his friends. But sometimes it is undesirable to give
explanations until they can be securely correct, or haply the sick man
is too ill to receive them. Then we are apt, and wisely, to treat some
dominant symptom, and to wait until the disease assumes definite shape.
So it is that much of what we thus give is mild enough. The restless
mother is the cause with some doctors of much of this use of mere
harmless medicines. I once expressed surprise in a consultation that an
aged physician, who had called me in, should be so desirous of doing
something, when I as earnestly wished to wait. At last he said, "Doctor,
it is not the child I want to dose; it is the mother's mind." Perhaps
the anecdote may not be lost on some too solicitous woman, who naturally
desires that the doctor should be doing something just when he is most
anxious to be doing nothing.