As I have said for years: The physician who gives drugs can't possibly know where his patient is. "Peritoneal collapse!" If there had been no narcotism there would have been no appearance of collapse. Every symptom giving the appearance of collapse was due to opium and morphine. I have seen such collapses for I have made them, and I have suffered all the torments possible in this world of medical uncertainty. For fifteen years after starting to practice my profession I labored hard with symptoms of my own making. After drug action and symptoms were once developed, I knew nothing more about my patients; it is true I guessed, and theorized, and reasoned, but in truth I did not know positively just where my patients were. I consoled myself in those days with the thought that some day I should know; I believed that the fault was with me, that I was lacking in diagnostic ability, and that by hard work the time would come when I could read disease by its symptoms as well as the best, for I then thought the big men of the profession knew everything they pretended to know This was my ambition, but the ability to size up symptoms under given conditions and tell their true worth forever eluded me and kept me in a state of unrest and discontent that was next to ruining my life. If light had not come when it did I should have abandoned the profession, but it came accidentally; it could not come otherwise for I did not know how to look for it. In the course of time I stored in my memory many cases that from accident or caprice had recovered without drugs and food. The satisfactory advance made by sick people, suffering from different diseases, when they were left without food or drugs, occurred so often, and with such unvarying regularity that it ceased to be a coincident--it was absurd for me to continue to explain the results by the hackneyed word "coincident," a word that is usually loaded with a lot of dogmatism, idleness and selfishness.