Then there is the _Infirmary_.--Nothing I like better than to see subscriptions to this admirable house of help and comfort to the poor, advertised as from the quarry men of Craigleith; from Mr. Milne the brassfounder's men; from Peeblesshire; from the utmost Orkneys; and from those big, human mastiffs, the navvies. And yet we doctors are often met by the most absurd and obstinate objections by domestic servants in town, and by country people, to going there. This prejudice is lessening, but it is still great. "O, I canna gang into the Infirmary; I would rather dee!" Would you, indeed? Not you, or, if so, the sooner the better. They have a notion that they are experimented on, and slain by the surgeons; neglected and poisoned by the nurses, etc., etc. Such utter nonsense! I know well about the inner life and work of at least our Infirmary, and of that noble old Minto House, now gone; and I would rather infinitely, were I a servant, 'prentice boy, or shopman, a porter, or student, and anywhere but in a house of my own, and even then, go straight to the Infirmary, than lie in a box-bed off the kitchen, or on the top of the coal-bunker, or in a dark hole in the lobby, or in a double-bedded room. The food, the bedding, the physicians, the surgeons, the clerks, the dressers, the medicines, the wine and porter,--and they don't scrimp these when necessary,--the books, the Bibles, the baths, are all good,--are all better far than one man in ten thousand can command in his own house. So off with a grateful heart and a fearless to the Infirmary, and your mistress can come in and sit beside you; and her doctor and yours will look in and single you out with his smile and word, and cheer you and the ward by a kindly joke, and you will come out well cured, and having seen much to do you good for life. I never knew any one who was once in, afraid of going back; they know better. There are few things in human nature finer than the devotion and courage of medical men to their hospital and charitable duties; it is to them a great moral discipline. Not that they don't get good--selfish good--to themselves. Why shouldn't they? Nobody does good without getting it; it is a law of the government of God. But, as a rule, our medical men are not kind and skilful and attentive to their hospital patients, because this is to make them famous, or even because through this they are to get knowledge and fame; they get all this, and it is their only and their great reward. But they are in the main disinterested men. Honesty is the best policy; but, as Dr. Whately, in his keen way, says, "that man is not honest who is so for this reason," and so with the doctors and their patients. And I am glad to say for my profession, few of them take this second-hand line of duty.