It is hardly necessary to say to the reader who has followed me this far that the scope of medical symbolism is not very restricted. In extent it is obviously not limited; nor is it without variety and the means of variety enough. Yet how little use does one see made of it! How seldom do publishers take any advantage whatever of it, on the covers of their books or anywhere else! And what little is here and there attempted is apt to be a trifle preposterous, on a par with the misuse of the serpent by the quack-medicine man, who confounds the most obvious religious (Christian) significance of it with the medical. Examples without limit of questionable medical symbols might be given. Here is a publisher who makes use of the caduceus of Hermes; there is one who displays the club of Hercules, with a rather venomous-looking serpent crawling down it from aloft; and yonder one who exhibits a skull on a closed book, suggestive of a hopeless meditation on death,—the reverse of what the physician should indulge in. But, at a time when the absence of symbols is almost the rule, perhaps one should try to be a little blind to the faults of those which are met with. Of a collection of medical symbols on hand, few are notably good. I may instance a fair specimen. On the title-page of a journal edited by the late Dr. Dunglison, a learned and sensible man, _The American Medical Intelligencer_, which had a brief existence in the latter half of the fourth decade of this century, appears the figure a copy of which is here given (Fig. 26). The idea is better than its execution. Ideas for symbolic designs of medical import are not scarce. The instruments and drugs used by the disciples of Æsculapius afford a host, if one does not wish to turn to mythology or anything allied. But, although the scientific physician might properly hesitate about using, say, an emblem of St. Luke, the patron saint of physicians, there are mythological and related conceptions, many of which might be utilized to good purpose. Thus, if it be desired to give an Egyptian design on the cover of a book, say, on obstetrics, the main part of an admirable one may be found ready at hand on the wall of the great temple at Luxor.[530] It is the scene—and a sufficiently chaste one, too—of the maiden mother giving birth to the future king, Amunotoph III, for whom the temple or palace was erected about 1400 B.C. She is seated on the midwife’s stool, as described in the Bible,[531] while two nurses have her by the hands, doing what they can to ease the pains of labor. Or, a representation of Pasht, Bubastis, or Sekhet, the sister of Horus and mother of Imhotep,—who generally appeared cat-headed because the cat, a most sacred animal, was consecrated to her,—would not be inappropriate; for, to use the words of Ebers, “she seems to have been honored as the deity who conferred the blessing of children and watched over their birth.”[532] [Illustration: FIG. 26.—A MEDICAL SYMBOL.]