“Why, yes, after the recent experience of a friend of mine, I did begin to think that there would soon be no such personage left as that same old-fashioned family doctor. Shall I tell you what that experience was?” The young Doctor said he should be mightily pleased to hear it. He was going to be one of those old-fogy practitioners himself. “I don't know,” the Counsellor said, “whether my friend got all the professional terms of his story correctly, nor whether I have got them from him without making any mistakes; but if I do make blunders in some of the queer names, you can correct me. This is my friend's story: “My family doctor,” he said, “was a very sensible man, educated at a school where they professed to teach all the specialties, but not confining himself to any one branch of medical practice. Surgical practice he did not profess to meddle with, and there were some classes of patients whom he was willing to leave to the female physician. But throughout the range of diseases not requiring exceptionally skilled manual interference, his education had authorized him to consider himself, and he did consider himself, qualified to undertake the treatment of all ordinary cases--It so happened that my young wife was one of those uneasy persons who are never long contented with their habitual comforts and blessings, but always trying to find something a little better, something newer, at any rate. I was getting to be near fifty years old, and it happened to me, as it not rarely does to people at about that time of life, that my hair began to fall out. I spoke of it to my doctor, who smiled, said it was a part of the process of reversed evolution, but might be retarded a little, and gave me a prescription. I did not find any great effect from it, and my wife would have me go to a noted dermatologist. The distinguished specialist examined my denuded scalp with great care. He looked at it through a strong magnifier. He examined the bulb of a fallen hair in a powerful microscope. He deliberated for a while, and then said, 'This is a case of alopecia. It may perhaps be partially remedied. I will give you a prescription.' Which he did, and told me to call again in a fortnight. At the end of three months I had called six times, and each time got a new recipe, and detected no difference in the course of my 'alopecia.' After I had got through my treatment, I showed my recipes to my family physician; and we found that three of them were the same he had used, familiar, old-fashioned remedies, and the others were taken from a list of new and little-tried prescriptions mentioned in one of the last medical journals, which was lying on the old doctor's table. I might as well have got no better under his charge, and should have got off much cheaper.