But there is another still more effectual obstacle, which prevents the public from making this selection with any degree of correctness. It is found in the representations, which are made by different physicians and empirics, of the cases under their care. There is great difference in physicians in regard to the degree of hope which they indulge in relation to their patients. One who is apt to be desponding will, from this cause, make such representations of the cases under his care, as will create the impression, that his patients are much more gravely sick, than those that are quite as sick under the care of another physician, who has a strong tendency to hope. And besides this, some make willful misrepresentations for their own selfish ends. A very common artifice, for the purpose of gaining credit, is to make great cases out of small ones. This is easily done. I will suppose a case. A child is taken sick, and the parents are full of anxiety. The physician sees at once that the case is not at present a grave one, and that remedies will probably in a short time give relief. If he be honest he will say so, and remove the undue anxiety of the parents. But if he be disposed, as many are, to make capital out of the anxieties of his employers, he will say that the child _is_ very sick, and perhaps that ‘it is well you have called me so soon,’ or, ‘I wish that you had called me before, but I think on the whole that the little one _can_ be relieved.’ Every physician knows how readily the imagination of a parent may be excited in relation to the symptoms of disease in a darling child. He has seen things believed to be true, under the influence of such an excitement, which have not the slightest foundation. How easy is it then in such a case to practice deception, or at least to leave the parents to deceive themselves with the figments of their own fancy. If the physician manage adroitly, his skill will be proclaimed with all the zeal which gratitude for a restored child can prompt. How dishonest, how _cruel_ is such a course! For the sake of his own reputation, he has given poignancy to the pangs of anxiety in the bosom of fond parents, when it was plainly his duty to quiet their fears, by telling them the true nature of the case.[26] The physician who practises such deception is indeed occasionally detected; but if he have tact enough to avoid being _often_ detected, and if he have effrontery enough to face down those who see through his arts, such occasional detection is but a small hindrance to success. In the case which I have supposed, the friends of the physician of course would claim for him, that there really was danger, and that he had the sagacity to see what common eyes could not. And the parents of the child would be very slow to believe that all their fear and anxiety were unfounded. Their pride, if nothing else, would prevent them from admitting this to be true.