The stayer at home smiled as if he understood his friend’s quiet bit of pleasantry, and reached for one of the treasures, but folded it in his hand without looking at it and seemed to be lost in meditation.  The surgeon concluded that he had had enough exercise and laid himself down on the wide sofa at the end of the room, from whence he could watch his companion’s face.  He clasped his hands under his head and looked eager and interested.  He had grown to have something of the appearance of a foreigner, as people often do who have spent much time in eastern countries.  The two friends were silent for some minutes, until an impatient voice roused Dr. Leslie from his reflections.

“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 ignorance.  The anatomists and the pathologists have their place, but we must look to the living to learn the laws of life, not to the dead.  A wreck shows you where the reef is, perhaps, but not how to manage a ship in the offing.  The men who make it their business to write the books and the men who make it their business to follow them aren’t the ones for successful practice.”