If a physician in whom he has confided for years cannot do it, or will not promise to do it, he will employ some one or make use of some nostrum that promises all he asks. Perhaps one physician is dismissed and a second employed, and he in his turn dismissed and a third called; and if the patient ever gets well, his recovery is ascribed to the physician last in charge, although his treatment may have been nugatory or slightly injurious. This state of things opens a wide door to empirics and nostrums. Cancer doctors, consumption curers, and an innumerable multitude of infallible remedies for all diseases that flesh is heir to, stand thick around and demand admittance. Many an invalid has spent months, and perhaps years, in experimenting upon himself, with one remedy after another, always employing the very best of the good, the newest of the new, and surest of the sure, until at last, like Paracelsus, he has died with a bottle of some infallible sanative by his side. Poor, deluded mortal! he would heed no sound advice, because he believed that doctors were selfish; he therefore followed an ignis fatuus, and it led him to his grave.
