However various, too, the impressions made by his book, there are two things certain; viz. that he was much talked of, and the book had an extensive sale, went through several editions, and served to give the _public_ some notion of those principles which he was so beautifully unfolding to the younger portions of the profession in his lectures. Besides, although there were not wanting those who spoke disparagingly of him, still, as an old and very far-seeing colleague of our own used to say, with perhaps too much truth, when canvassing the various difficulties of a medical man's progress in the metropolis, "A man had better be spoken ill of, than not spoken of at all." He was now beginning to be very largely consulted. The Public had "got hold of him," as we once heard a fashionable physician phrase it, and he soon obtained a large practice. A great many consulted him for very good reasons, and probably many for little better reason than that he was the fashion. Abernethy had now an amount of practice to which neither he nor any other man could do full justice. Finding it impossible to make people understand his views in the time usually allotted for consultation, he now referred his patients to his book, and especially page 72. This has been made the subject of a great deal of quizzing, and of something besides, not altogether quite so good-natured. For our parts, we think it the most natural thing in the world to refer a patient to a book, which may contain more in full the principles we desire them to understand, than we can hope to find opportunity to explain at the time of consultation. We think that if asking a few questions, and writing a prescription (and we are here only thinking of a reasonably fair average time visit), be worth a guinea, the explaining a principle, or so placing a plan before a patient that his following it may be assisted and secured, is worth fifty times as much; and it came particularly well from Abernethy, one of whose lessons, and a most excellent lesson too, was the remark, "That if a medical man thought he had done his duty when he had written a prescription, and a patient regarded his as fulfilled when he had swallowed it, they were both deceived."