"It always makes me covet my neighbor's wits when I see you!"
announced the wanderer. "If I settled myself into a respectable
practice I should be obliged to march with the army of doctors who
carry a great array of small weapons, and who find out what is the
matter with their patients after all sorts of experiment and
painstaking analysis, and comparing the results of their thermometers
and microscopes with scientific books of reference. After I have done
all that, you know, if I have had good luck I shall come to exactly
what you can say before you have been with a sick man five minutes.
You have the true gift for doctoring, you need no medical dictator,
and whatever you study and whatever comes to you in the way of
instruction simply ministers to your intuition. It grows to be a
wonderful second-sight in such a man as you. I don't believe you
investigate a case and treat it as a botanist does a strange flower,
once a month. You know without telling yourself what the matter is,
and what the special difference is, and the relative dangers of this
case and one apparently just like it across the street, and you could
do this before you were out of the hospitals. I remember you!" and
after a few vigorous puffs of smoke he went on; "It is all very well
for the rest of the men to be proud of their book learning, but they
don't even try to follow nature, as Sydenham did, who followed no man.
I believe such study takes one to more theory and scientific digest
rather than to more skill. It is all very well to know how to draw
maps when one gets lost on a dark night, or even to begin with
astronomical calculations and come down to a chemical analysis of the
mud you stand in, but hang me if I wouldn't rather have the instinct
of a dog who can go straight home across a bit of strange country. A
man has no right to be a doctor if he doesn't simply make everything
bend to his work of getting sick people well, and of trying to remedy
the failures of strength that come from misuse or inheritance or