Symmachus is apparently above all such _gaucheries_. He has been trained to bear himself as a polished gentleman. His visits are long or short according to the desires of his patients. He never blurts out unpleasant truths and he always repeats the Hippocratic maxim, “A cure depends on three things, the sick man, his sickness, and the physician”; and that the physician’s business is to help the sick man to cure himself. The result is that while his anatomical theories would distress a later age, and some of his medicines are very crude, he often effects excellent results especially in those cases where mental therapeutics can avail a little. Such a doctor possesses a set of surgical instruments quite as good as any available in a later age until at least the time of the French Revolution, and assuredly he knows how to use them very skillfully. He can dull pain for operations or induce sleep by juice of mandragora or atropin, and he can operate for cataract by distending the eye-pupil by anagallis. Delicate surgical operations, however, he will probably turn over to specialists. There are such surgeons who operate, no doubt with reasonable success, for hernia and fistula, who take out gall-stones, and deal with very dangerous fractures. There are also lesser specialists who can remove or fill aching teeth and can banish superfluous hair, and there is one shrewd old fellow who commands a princely income--he can really erase the degrading marks of branding upon slaves, after they become lordly freedmen. =141. Medical Books and Famous Remedies.=--Symmachus affects to be a man of professional learning. He possesses and claims to have studied carefully the great medical treatises of Hermogenes of Smyrna in 72 books, and that of Tiberius Claudius Menecrates in 156 books. To impress his patients he will talk learnedly of the jangling theories of the “Dogmatics,” and “Methodics,” “Pneumaticists,” etc., although professing himself to be an “Eclectic.” However, his own shrewd common sense is usually of greater avail than all his books. A large part of a popular physician’s gains come not from regular fees, but from supplying his patients with medicine. There are many shops selling crude drugs in Rome but no regular prescription pharmacists.[80] Public opinion avers that the more costly remedies are always the best, and Symmachus does not discourage that idea too much, although telling his select patients that cheap medicaments often are as effective. It is often hard, however, to get pure drugs, and genuine ingredients.[81] Even the best doctors will be deceived by oriental drug dealers palming off false balsams, and similar commodities.