A medical junta in Lima is commonly continued morning and evening, and from day to day, till the patient is pronounced to be out of danger. As the junta breaks up after each separate meeting, it is customary for the president of the meeting, or one of the physicians, to say, as he leaves his seat, “Vamos a consolar al enfermo,”—Let us go to console the patient; and then all the doctors present re-enter the patient’s apartment to soothe and to console him; and after this one of the number steps forward to lay down the regimen—“a dar el regimen”—agreed upon in consultation, and which one or more nurses and attendants are now ready to receive from the mouth of the physician. After the formality of a junta is thought no longer necessary, it often happens that, by wish of the patient or his relatives, two or more of the medical advisers return at separate hours, but by mutual agreement, for several days, by way of further security to the sick, or as a source of satisfaction to his family. After all the care possible bestowed on the part of doctors, it often happens that, when the patient recovers, San Antonio, or any other saint after whom the individual is named, has all the credit of the cure; but, when the case is unprosperous, then all the evil is ascribed to human agency. In Lima, as elsewhere, it will readily enough be admitted in general terms that all must die; but regarding this proposition, when death strikes any one in particular, difficulties at once suggest themselves; for the surviving friends are ever ready to assign many reasons why they are quite sure the deceased might have escaped, had it not been for this or that physician that misunderstood his malady. Hence it may be said that it is only in well-regulated juntas, and in public hospitals, that the people of Lima are supposed to glide to their latter end by fair and natural means. Upon this subject we heard it remarked by a sagacious native, “Should a gambler lose at a cock-fight, he does not attribute the loss to any fault in the cock, but to some trick done to him; if a horse lose in a race, his owner never acknowledges the cause of the failure to be in the animal, but assigns it to some accident thrown in his way: and surely, when we know that on such comparatively trivial occasions men thus talk and think, it is but natural for them, in an affair of such moment and interest as life itself, never to believe that a friend or relative loses his existence from any fault of his own, or any defect in his organization, but rather that his demise should be charged, as we see it is, though often unjustly, on the blind and stumbling ignorance, or unpardonable carelessness and indifference of the physicians.”