surgeons from educated and wealthy patients; and some of the most successful doctors on the register use quite heretical methods of treating disease, and have qualified themselves solely for convenience.  Leaving out of account the village witches who prescribe spells and sell charms, the humblest professional healers in this country are the herbalists.  These men wander through the fields on Sunday seeking for herbs with magic properties of curing disease, preventing childbirth, and the like.  Each of them believes that he is on the verge of a great discovery, in which Virginia Snake Root will be an ingredient, heaven knows why!  Virginia Snake Root fascinates the imagination of the herbalist as mercury used to fascinate the alchemists.  On week days he keeps a shop in which he sells packets of pennyroyal, dandelion, etc., labelled with little lists of the diseases they are supposed to cure, and apparently do cure to the satisfaction of the people who keep on buying them.  I have never been able to perceive any distinction between the science of the herbalist and that of the duly registered doctor.  A relative of mine recently consulted a doctor about some of the ordinary symptoms which indicate the need for a holiday and a change.  The doctor satisfied himself that the patient’s heart was a little depressed.  Digitalis being a drug labelled as a heart specific by the profession, he promptly administered a stiff dose.  Fortunately the patient was a hardy old lady who was not easily killed.  She recovered with no worse result than her conversion to Christian Science, which owes its vogue quite as much to public despair of doctors as to superstition.  I am not, observe, here concerned with the question as to whether the dose of digitalis was judicious or not; the point is, that a farm laborer consulting a herbalist would have been treated in exactly the same way.

BACTERIOLOGY AS A SUPERSTITION

The smattering of science that all—­even doctors—­pick up from the ordinary newspapers nowadays only makes the doctor more dangerous than he used to be.  Wise men used to take care to consult doctors qualified before 1860, who were usually contemptuous of or indifferent to the germ theory and bacteriological therapeutics; but now that these veterans have mostly retired or died, we are left in the hands of the generations which, having heard of microbes much as St. Thomas Aquinas heard of angels, suddenly concluded that the whole art of healing could be summed up in the formula:  Find the microbe and kill it.  And even that they did not know how to do.  The simplest way to kill most microbes is to throw them into an open street or river and let the sun shine on them, which explains the fact that when great cities have recklessly thrown all their sewage into the open river the water has sometimes been cleaner twenty miles below the city than thirty miles above it.  But doctors instinctively avoid all facts