‘Just think! there are nearly a million more women than men in these happy islands, and they are all bound to live. And accentuate the thought by my assurance that there is no one so ambitious and remorseless in professional competition as a clever woman! While our male medical students are dissipating, idling, fooling, as they have always done since Hippocrates’ days, their lady rivals are preparing to puzzle a John Hunter, a Claude Bernard, a Bichat, or any savant living or dead. I prophesy that, before the end of this century, women will sit in most of the high places of the medical profession. They have keener wits than men; they are more moral, more industrious, and more sympathetic. But I leave this part of the subject for another and more discouraging still—people are beginning to be their _own doctors_! When I was a young man, few persons were bold enough to quack themselves. Now; there are millions swallowing homeopathic pills and tinctures, and diagnosing their own ailments themselves! Add to them the other millions who feed themselves on patent medicines, and, I tell you, the field of operation is alarmingly diminishing for doctors of either sex. Nor have I yet unfolded more than a fraction of my sorrowful tale. Other multitudes, who, by all that is fair in social life, instead of following the good old plan of sending for the doctor when they have eaten, drunk, and worked, or pleasured too freely, now bolt away to some hydropathic palace, and positively turn a fit of sickness into a spell of luxury! Talk about the Sybarites of old! Go rather and look at our own, “packed,” shampooed, handled, dandled, and fondled in the vast number of our hydropathic “Halls of Idleness” and sensuous convalescing sanatoria! Do not stay to deplore these lapses from the stern old British methods of phlebotomy, leeching, purging, and partaking of all that was nauseous, but receive my most startling confidence—the public don’t believe in us as of old!