When a physician visits a patient, and finds him in a doubtful or critical state, he must never omit to warn the patient or his friends of his real situation, with a view to enable them to call a medical consultation, and allow time for testamentary preparations and spiritual confession. The neglect of this precautionary measure would, in the event of the disease terminating fatally, bring great blame on the physician; but, after he has notified what he considers to be the patient’s real condition, then, whether the parties interested in such communication choose to act upon his advice or not, he has acquitted himself properly; and when the patient, previously confessed and sacramented, dies with the benefit of a consultation, or duly assisted by a medical junta, he is said to die according to rule, that is, _morir en regla_. The great medical juntas in Lima, by which we understand consultations where more than four or five doctors are met together, are remarkable occasions of oratorical display. The warmest discussion frequently turns on the dose, composition, or medicinal operation of some common drug; and all the learning, method, and criticism, sometimes discovered at these solemn debates, terminate not unfrequently in the most simple practice, by which the nurse is enjoined to have recourse to the jeringa, and the patient told he must drink “agua de pollo,” or chicken-tea, until the return of the junta. In former times such consultations were called oftener than necessary, because a great junta became a sort of ostentatious exhibition, in which all who could afford to cite a group of doctors desired to imitate the great and the wealthy. A sample, on a little scale, of such fashionable follies, is familiar to the Limenian in the well-known local story of the two doctors, who, for a month or more, daily met in consultation at the house of a family in town, where, as they retired to the supposed privacy of a consulting-room, the one would clear his throat, and ask the other, “_Come el enfermo hoy?_”—May the patient eat to-day?—to which the second doctor would reply, “_Como no? si, comera._”—Why not? yes, he shall eat. Thus, day after day, began and ended the consultation, as far at least as its topics of discussion concerned the patient; while the good old doctors spun out a regular allowance of time before they rejoined the patient, or his attendants, serenely to announce the well-matured result of their conference. A man of _nous_, accustomed to listen behind the scenes, at length broke in upon their consultation; and dismissed them one day by paying to each his usual fee, and telling them both how happy he was to find that he now knew as much as themselves, for that he could repeat as well as anybody, “Come el enfermo hoy?—Como no? si, comera.”