He patiently taught this eager young scholar day by day, and gave her, as fast as he could, the benefit of the wisdom which he had gained through faithful devotion to his business and the persistent study of many years.  Nan followed step by step, and, while becoming more conscious of her own ignorance and of the uncertainties and the laws of the practice of medicine with every week’s study, knew better and better that it is resource, and bravery, and being able to think for one’s self, that make a physician worth anything.  There must be an instinct that recognizes a disease and suggests its remedy, as much as an instinct that finds the right notes and harmonies for a composer of music, or the colors for a true artist’s picture, or the results of figures for a mathematician.  Men and women may learn these callings from others; may practice all the combinations until they can carry them through with a greater or less degree of unconsciousness of brain and fingers; but there is something needed beside even drill and experience; every student of medicine should be fitted by nature with a power of insight, a gift for his business, for knowing what is the right thing to do, and the right time and way to do it; must have this God-given power in his own nature of using and discovering the resources of medicine without constant reliance upon the books or the fashion.  Some men use their ability for their own good and renown, and some think first of the good of others, and as the great poet tells the truths of God, and makes other souls wiser and stronger and fitter for action, so the great doctor works for the body’s health, and tries to keep human beings free from the failures that come from neglect and ignorance, and ready to be the soul’s instrument of action and service in this world.  It is not to keep us from death, it is no superstitious avoidance of the next life, that should call loudest for the physician’s skill; but the necessity of teaching and remedying the inferior bodies which have come to us through either our ancestors’ foolishness or our own.  So few people know even what true and complete physical life is, much less anything of the spiritual existence that is already possible, and so few listen to what the best doctors are trying their best to teach.  While half-alive people think it no wrong to bring into the world human beings with even less vitality than themselves, and take no pains to keep the simplest laws of health, or to teach their children to do so, just so long there will be plenty of sorrow of an avoidable kind, and thousands of shipwrecked, and failing, and inadequate, and useless lives in the fullest sense of the word.  How can those who preach to the soul hope to be heard by those who do not even make the best of their bodies? but alas, the convenience and easiness, or pleasure, of the present moment is allowed to become the cause of an endless series of terrible effects, which go down into the distance of the future, multiplying themselves a thousandfold.