THAT certain parts of the human body enjoy the protection of practitioners, who respectively devote themselves to their service, I confess. Such appropriations may also be beneficial, at least, to the practitioners. I can even conceive, that a professed dentist may clean, scale, and draw teeth, or an oculist couch a cataract, better than either a physician or surgeon. These may in their respective practice be excelled by those partial artists. But I much doubt, even as to these, whether their trusting too much to that partial excellence, does not sometimes do more mischief than good, for want of duly consulting the relation of such parts to the universal fabric, of which physicians and surgeons must be so much better judges. Galen does not appear in contradiction to common sense, where he observes, that to rectify a disorder of the eye, the head must be rectified, which cannot well be done without rectifying the whole body. In confirmation of which, I once myself knew a gentleman, whom a professed oculist, at Paris, assured of the loss of his eyes being infallible; and who upon his despondingly consulting a regular physician, was by him as positively assured, that those very condemned eyes might be saved by a proper regimen. The gentleman happily believed him, and his eye-sight was not only saved, but perfectly restored. ANOTHER instance of the like nature occurs to me, which seems applicable to the dentist, and which I quote here from a translation of the learned and ingenious Dr. Huxham’s observations on the constitution of the air. “MANY years ago I knew a gentleman of a hale, robust habit of body, who, from being too much addicted to the drinking of brandy, fell into a violent jaundice, from which however he would have recovered well enough, would he have conformed himself to the advice of his _physicians_: but he on the contrary, because his _gums_ were very apt to bleed, and his _teeth_ stunk from the _scorbutic taint_, put himself into the hands of an ignorant _pretender to physic for the cure of these inconveniencies_. This fellow immediately set about _scaling his teeth_, and _rubbing his gums_ with _his famous teeth-powder_, till at last, by perpetually fretting and irritating the loose texture, he brought on such a hemorrhage, that baffled all the stiptics that could be invented by the most expert surgeons, and continuing to spout forth in small streams from the little arteries of the gums, which were now every where divided: in the space of _sixteen hours_ the poor man _died_ through mere loss of blood.” THESE instances are however only adduced to justify that doubt which I expressed of these partial artists being _always_ to be beneficially consulted in those local affections, to which their talent is supposed exclusively appropriated.