Page:Essentials of the Art of Medicine Stille.djvu/20

20 which we call genius. By the greater number the relations are discovered by long, laborious, and repeatedly fruitless experiment. The conclusions of the former we call brilliant, and they really are so in their meteoric rapidity and brightness; but their duration is apt to be brief and their utility is questionable. The results of slower, more deliberate and searching methods are more frequently substantial and permanent. Undoubtedly the most reliable physician is one who combines in due proportion the illumination of genius and a calm, judicial analysis and estimate of the case he is called upon to treat.

His power is most surely exhibited by that supreme tact which enables him to eliminate from a case its non-essential elements and wisely adapt his remedies to those which make up, as it were, the body of the disease, and upon which its issue practically depends. To accomplish this purpose he will, first of all, determine whether his active interference with the evolution of the disease is necessary or will be advantageous. He is the spectator of a combat between nature and disease, and knows that it must be "fought to a finish." He knows that, whether assisted or not, nature will determine the issue of the conflict, and it is only when nature falters or fails that the physician should interfere to sustain her and put down her enemy. He should withhold his armament of drugs unless the necessity of using it becomes imperative, and be content rather to remove hindrances out of nature's way than to employ his drugs as her substitute. It is too frequently forgotten that we run great risk of resisting the restorative powers of nature when we attempt to substitute for them agencies of our own devising. Even when we employ them it is wise to use them gently, lest we injure where we intended to help. We should remember the ancient fable of the bear that in his attempt to drive the flies from his master's face crushed it to a jelly. Whatever else of his studies the educated physician may forget, he should always remember the ne quid nimis of the ancients, and learn that by holding and using too many weapons at once he runs the risk of using none efficiently.

Two hundred years ago Sir William Temple, one of the most sagacious, learned, and experienced men of his time, in a discourse upon the gout, from which he had suffered, as well as from many things of many physicansphysicians [sic], wrote as follows (Works, iii. 248): "I had passed twenty years of my life and several accidents of danger in my health without any use of physicians; and from some experiments of my own as well as much reading and thought upon that subject, had