A peasant is seized with a shivering, followed by feverishness, and accompanied with a slight cough—he goes to bed, and excessive heat and thirst prompt him to drink plentifully of plain water; on the second or third day a copious sweat bursts from all his pores, and terminates the disorder. A person of fortune is seized with the same symptoms, arising from the same cause, and which would have been cured by the same means, in the same space of time; but the apothecary is called, who immediately sends pectoral linctuses to remove the cough, and afterwards gives a vomit, to remove the nausea which the linctuses have occasioned: the heat and fever augment; the physician is called; he orders the patient to be blooded, to abate the violence of the fever, and gives a little physic on some other account. All this prevents the natural crisis by sweat; and the patient being farther teased by draughts or powders every two or three hours, nature cannot shake off the fever so soon by six or seven days, as she would have done had she been left to herself. She generally does her business at last, however; and then the physician and apothecary glory in the happy effects of their skill, and receive the grateful thanks of their patient for having cured him of a dangerous fever. Every body of common penetration, at all conversant in medical matters, must have seen enough to convince them that the above description is not exaggerated; but it is not to be inferred from this, that the art of medicine is of no use to mankind. There are many diseases in which nature sinks, without medical assistance. It is the part of the penetrating and experienced physician to distinguish these from others, and leave it to the knavish and weak to assume the merit of cures in cases where they know, or ought to know, that medicine can do nothing.